Sufjan Stevens ‎– The Age Of Adz

I reached out to Asthmatic Kitty because of surface noise and poor quality of the sides C+D lp. Basically the same issues other people are having. They were super nice and offered to send a replacement but also said a repress of this album is in the works. Just a heads up to anyone thinking of picking this up to hold off and be on the lookout for the reissue that I'm sure will be much better quality.

Mine has a skip on "Impossible Soul," but in the most inadvertently perfect way: it's at the VERY end, and loops Sufjan saying "so impossible / so impossible / so impossible / so impossible." Thus, I now have access to FOUR equally excellent endings. Here they are, in order from saddest to happiest:

1) Vinyl (my defective edition): looping "so impossible" into infinity and beyond
2) Vinyl (standard edition): fading out on the desolate drone
3) Digital: the melancholy solace of "pleasure principle"
4) Live: the jump cut to "Chicago." All things grow! All things grow!

Very pleased with this - it's like a "choose your own adventure" book.

The mastering sounds pretty good, but the manufacturing quality is lacking. I had to enlarge the spindle hole on one disc, and both have a fairly persistent non-fill (ripping paper-ish sound). It’s a busy, dense album sound wise so the defects mostly get buried behind the music, but in quiet passages it is very annoying.

A lot more choatic compard to "the ascension". But the distinct sound is still there. But not at all bad. The constant contrast between the beats and the vocals kept clashing a bit too much imo, but not that hars that is felt distonal. All in all, it was a good listen, but I wasn't amazed. It's a solid 7/10 -> 3/5

My first copy sounds terrible. Lot of distortions and surface noise, especially on sides A and C. I contacted Asthmatic Kitty and they send me replacement discs and they sound fantastic. No distortions and noise. Distorted discs have more green label and new ones are more blue. So if you record sounds terrible check the label colour, maybe it was faulty series.

I was expecting to have a booklet or a sheet with the lyrics, but oh well...

There's a bit in 'impossible soul', around 5.40 when it sounds like Giorgio Moroder's 'the chase' is about to come in (and that's just one of about 2000 different things that are going on in this crazy but brilliant piece of music). Maybe Sufjan is going to cover Donna Summers 'I feel love' for one of his b-sides. Go on Sufjan, you could turn it into one of your christmas hymns.