I found this review by Jesse Jarnow, a big Phish fan. I've read a lot of his reviews and they are all on target, as is this one:
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Phish, COVENTRY, Coventry, VT- 8/14 & 15
Jesse Jarnow
2004-08-18
FROM THE TOURING DESK: The Curtain (Hemlock Rockin' in Northern Vermont)
Home (finally)
Brooklyn, New York
1. Dramatis Personae: Wookies, etc.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, dude (and you know we had our share) (or something). For their final performances, Phish starred in (though by no means solely orchestrated) one of the most dramatic goodbyes in rock and roll history. Those who participated - that is, the band and some 65,000 fans - will likely not much remember the music Phish made so much as a sequence of visceral events with four fairly bewildered musicians at the gravitational center.
The stage was dressed before most fans left the parking lot of the band's Thursday show in Camden, New Jersey, and assuredly before they crossed Vermont's southern border. The rains had come a few days earlier (record precipitation, the promoters have stressed) and turned the Newport State Airport into a real-life version of Sunk City, the as-it-sounds installation constructed for 2003's IT festival. One rumor circulating cell-to-cell during the rain-soaked northern crawl suggested that the stage was, in fact, sinking and the National Guard or the Navy Corp of Engineers or somebody had been called into, um, de-sink it. Though later declared to be patently false, it sums up the general conditions of the grounds (and even still seems eminently plausible, with a line of aesthetically-confusing boulders at the foot of the stage). In summary: mud.
Now enter the hippies - tens of thousands of 'em - hurdling up Vermont's Interstate 91 towards Phish's date with eternity. At the site, the overwhelmed staff dealt with a swamp, and directed folks the best they could to the contracting patches of higher ground. Those who arrived on Friday evening (in a drizzling rain) had to contend with pitching their tents or parking their RVs atop rapidly liquefying fields. Those who arrived later were met with a massively immovable wall of cars considerably south of the concert, and - come Saturday morning - an ominous and unbelievable announcement from The Bunny, the festival's on-site radio station: yes, the festival is going on but we're cutting off everybody south of the I-91 turnoff and could everybody else please turn around and go home (we're sincerely sorry, thank you, don't come again). By daybreak, a tape recording of bassist Mike Gordon and Sgt. Bruce Melendy of the Vermont State Police was playing on a veritable loop between the DJs' righteously tasteful cuts. What The Bunny could not broadcast was the sound of several thousand hearts sinking at once.
And so it came to be that, on the 35th anniversary of Woodstock, many Phishheads found themselves faced with a choice between abandoning their cars by the side of the road after enduring some 36 hours of traffic and hiking as much as 15 miles to the concert site or giving up and going home to join their friends at the concerts' nationwide movie theater simulcast. At least several thousand people picked the former, and tramped like refugees across the idyllic (albeit muddy) Vermont landscape of green rolling hills and barns and sweet-as-lemonade l'il houses-with porch-swings-and-whatnot towards Coventry. They came with backpacks, camping gear, and glowed the beatific glow of those on a Mission. By mid-afternoon, a steady stream was arriving on foot at the typically weird Phish festival site: acres of car-punctuated Tent City, long stretches of asphalt filled with the aromatic Shakedown Street bazaar of red-eyed revelers and vendors (frequently with little difference), crazy art pieces and costumed performers coordinated by Russ Bennett and Lars Fisk (this year based around an oversized burlesque medicine show), and small classy touches (including a local farmers' market where concert-goers could construct cheap meals of ridiculously delicious produce and - for Zen/dietary counter-balance - a tent selling gravy fries from Nectar's, the famed Burlington bar where the band used to gig).
Anybody who was there to soak it in had clearly gone through a lot (and clearly cared enough about Phish to do so), and probably already had amassed a heaping mound of campfire stories from the trip up (if there were only campfires to tell 'em around), likely stemming from some combination of long-hours inside-joke camaraderie or shared (and/or misdirected) close-quarters frustration. For Phish's backwoods camp-outs, the Journey To The Middle of Nowhere (most infamously a point so far in northeastern Maine that it is practically in the same time zone as Nova Scotia) has always played a large symbolic role. With Coventry, it reached its absolute apex as an art form for priming an audience for a pure emotional experience with whatever music was being made.
Got all that? Good.
Now enter Phish, about to break up after beating a 20-year path to these two final shows (during which they built a practically religious cult following), playing publicly in their home state for the first time in seven years, with all of the above pressure liberally and profoundly applied to their shoulders. If nothing else, it was the script for an old-fashioned Be Here Now happening on a massive scale, a meta-movie whose main action began the moment Phish stepped on stage early on Saturday evening for the first of six sets over two days.
2. Hemlock Rock
The musical details of the weekend, for the moment, are easy to forget (though, with LivePhish.com's pristine soundboards to go on, within days will be all that is left). Even with all of the above build, the end result of Coventry was still six separate performances from Phish, all around an hour-and-a-half in length. The performances, like every other show Phish has ever played, consisted of four guys making music with (for the most part) voices, guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums.
Objectively speaking, the music Phish made at Coventry was uneven: transcendent at best, atrocious at worst. That said, nearly every person present will likely cherish every strand of memory they can retain from the experience -- and not because the band was ****ing in people's ears (though, sadly, they were at times), as they were once accused of doing, but because Phish turned in an incredibly sincere, open, naked performance. For a band that was once frequently attacked by critics for being emotionally sterile, it ironically took the gradual disintegration of their super-human musical precision to make for an expressively rich finale.
The good stuff on the first night of Coventry - of which there was a fair bit - was all very much in the vein of Phish's 2004 jamming: dark, ambient, and weird. And when they were jamming, it was (for the most part) very good. "AC/DC Bag" was long and intricate (and answered the question of whether Phish would ever play their Gamehendge rock opera again with a resounding "nope"), "Halley's Comet" slipped quietly into a sly reggae groove before landing in "Ya Mar," "Twist" had the band churning out a series of small, clean patterns (all shifting melody, no chords) which imperceptibly morphed the shape of the improvisation, "Stash" crested one last time from its dark base into majestic prettiness, "Free" had Gordon in an intimate guitar/bass duet with Trey Anastasio and, y'know, so on and so forth.
Atop all of this was an overwhelming sense of sadness and, later, all-out creepiness. In the first set, during "You Enjoy Myself," Anastasio presented the band's iconic mini-trampolines to the crowd, who dutifully shredded them into relics (one can imagine the bits someday going up on eBay replete with notarized proofs of authenticity). One intact piece was borne through the masses like a cartoonish Torah, occasionally brought low so that a fan might be raised above the crowd for a few bounces. There were more explanations, too, as Anastasio let the crowd in on a few more bits of band history, including the band's (gasp!) intentions with Junta's "David Bowie" (to create intricately out-there music that people could dance to). Unfortunately, the band's playing on the song's written-out parts didn't do Anastasio's ambitions (nor their monumental success) much justice.
And, even more unfortunately, it was a recurring theme for the remainder of the night, during which the band was overcome by whatever tipsy-fuddled demon gripped them in Las Vegas earlier this year. After a glorious guitar-loop/Jon Fishman-march segue into the introduction to "The Wedge," the band began stumbling over themselves. The bad playing - which seemed to come mostly from Anastasio - continued through the written part of "Stash" (though stopped just as soon as they start jamming again), returned when they segued into "Free" (and, again, disappeared when they went back to making it up anew). The pattern continued for the rest of the set (topped off by incoherent-even-by-his-normally-endearing-standards commentary from Anastasio).
And so Phish went into their last night as a band, forgoing their usual wee morning campgrounds set, rumored to be performed from atop the medicine show wagon in the Commons and dragged down the tarmac, but cancelled when the cars parked on the runway due to flooding got in the way. One to go.
Just remember to wash regularly and we'll be alright 
