By SAM HURWITT

You're driving through the moonlit desert, under the influence of a woman on the radio singing in a sweet, somnolent murmur. The band's playing a country blues so slow you reckon they're being paid by the hour. There's something hypnotic about the slow throom of the bass and the chanteuse's warbling that's liable to run you off the road if you aren't careful.

A band so mellow they're practically inert, the Cowboy Junkies may be an acquired taste -- and a threat to highway safety -- but they can easily become addictive. The Junkies' languid, bluesy country stylings have earned them many fans who normally eschew twang. Margo Timmins' silky, haunting vocals breathe life into her brother Michael's offbeat, poetic lyrics; it's hard to listen to a song like "Misguided Angel" or their version of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" without getting chills.

As lovely as the Junkies are, I've never been tempted to see them in concert. Rightly or wrongly, I picture them as particularly euphonious shoegazers -- sweet medicine for the ear, but not much to look at. So I picked up their newest release, "200 More Miles" -- a 2-CD collection of live performances spanning the band's decade-long history -- with a degree of detached anticipation. Concert albums tend to fall into two categories: either they sound lousy, in which case you had to be there to appreciate them, or they sound terrific, in which case you really had to be there.

"200 More Miles" definitely rests on the more pleasant end of the scale. Few of the songs, though, are substantially different from the preexisting studio versions. There are some beautiful renditions of "If You Were the Woman and I Was the Man" (a duet with John Prine) and the almost upbeat post-love song "Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning," but we've more or less heard them before. There are some long solos and messing around on "Murder, Tonight, in the Trailer Park" and "Walking After Midnight," which, for that reason, end their respective disks. Only two songs, both covers, are foreign to the band's previous five albums.

Containing many of the Cowboy Junkies' more popular songs, "200 More Miles" is designed to appease the fans and to lead intrepid neophytes to the band's other platters. Hopefully it will succeed in that goal: this may be a fairly representative sampling of the Junkies' oeuvre, but it's not their best work.