M.I.A. (2) – Arular

Sounds really great. Super clean and sound quality is great and crisp.

My pressing is reasonably flat and sounds really good. It sounds like the mastering engineer made use of the four sides to give the tracks room to breath.

Incredible sounding. Deep bass and accented sleaze. Great album too. $52 is underpaying right now for such a great record with great sound. If you love M.I.A./Arular, go for it ASAP.

This came in very warped. Also the running time is 38 minutes. Very wasteful to spread it across two discs. Also the lyrics were almost impossible to read the way they designed the gatefold. The fonts were either too small or badly fonted. Despite this the sound is good. I am tempted to return due to the warp, most apparent on disc 1 but I’ll deal with it. It came new.

Fantastic pressing. The music really comes to life on this pressing with great dynamics. Some light warping on LP1 for me, but does not affect playback.

Both copies I received have some excess repeating surface noise on the first two tracks. It's unfortunate because the rest of the album sounds great and the mix/master sounds great on vinyl otherwise.

I bought a copy of this sealed but second hand recently. I paid around $90 which is currently still the lowest this album has sold for on Discogs. At the time of purchase there was only one comment from someone who advised against spending high amounts on this LP but since it arrived there have been a few more.

As a few people have commented, the first disc did arrive with quite a bad dish warp but the second disc was fine. However I managed to correct the warp with an hour in the Vinyl Flat/Groovy Pouch and now it's flat with no damage to the record whatsoever. Other commenters have also noted that whilst the warp isn't ideal it seems to be fairly easy to fix.

Much like the VMP release of Kala, this is a loud, punchy and very nice sounding record. If you love this album and you're confident in whatever approach you use to fix the warp, I would recommend it.

The color vinyl is delightful to see, but it seems to come with some sort of background noise that I forgot about once the music was in full swing (which is about a half second in). All in all I enjoyed it and will play it often. By the way, the sound picture is seems to be missing something without a subwoofer, just saying. Hint hint.

I believe this release is from 2007 based on the Amazon page for it

Thankfully not all copies are warped. The first copy I ordered came warped (specifically the first record), but the free replacement came perfectly flat & sounds great. I'm keeping the first copy under weight for a week or so to see whether it flattens. I second the suggestion to potentially avoid sealed copies of this release.

EDIT/update: Heavy weight for a few days flattened the record nicely. Perhaps the same malleability that led to a lot of warping for this run means that it's fairly easy to fix. I gave this copy to someone who really wanted it.