Arcade Fire • The Suburbs
Merge Records MRG 385
Two 33-RPM 180 g LPs
The third album released by Canadian indie-rock group, Arcade Fire, The Suburbs won a Grammy Award in February 2011 for Album of the Year (and was nominated for two other Grammy Awards). Listening to the album, it’s easy to see—or rather, hear—why: musically, the album is pretty good. Incidentally, the vocalist’s voice reminds me a bit of New Order’s Bernard Sumner.
Unfortunately, the sound quality is more than a bit disappointing: the frequency extremes seem to be limited and too much compression has been applied. Not quite enough compression has been applied to render the album unlistenable, but the damage is substantial, and it could have been much better. A great album let down by poor production decisions. This is somewhat ironic given how the album was created: each track was pressed onto a 12” lacquer, which was subsequently recorded digitally to produce the album’s master, the idea being that the CD version should sound the same as the vinyl...