The Faint – Blank-Wave Arcade

Let's start with the good: This is an amazing album and been a favorite of mine for many years. The mastering and production of this re-released album is fantastic. It's flat with a sturdy weight. Plays very quietly without hiss, static, pops. Overall it's presented with clarity, music is crisp and precise and overall just dynamic sound. However, it's not all magic and bliss: for some reason the tracklisting has been changed, as far as I could discover, for no apparent reason. This completely throws off the logical flow if the album. In many if these songs, the closing is, at times a dramatic introduction into the next. For example, originally "call call" ends with the alternating thuds of static and electronics punctuated with moments of silence before speeding up into the opening of "worked up so sexual." Now you get that dramatic breakbeat followed by a longer pause of silence and then "victim convience" starts. There are other song placement swaps that aren't as disorienting but none the less it just throws off the momentum of the album and makes it disted and awkwardly paced. Knowing this now, I'd prefer not to have this album on vinyl vs. having the album in this peculiar rearagenged order.