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Amanda grabbed the new New Pornographers album, Twin Cinema, from emusic yesterday.

As expected, it’s totally awesome. allmusic’s review is pretty spot-on, and verbose reviews aren’t really my thing, so just go there, if you’re into that kind of thing. Stay here if you like reviews that are “This rocks!” or “this sucks dude!”

One thing I will add though is that the recording on this album is great. And I don’t just mean the “production” – the album itself is recorded very well. Nice clean, crisp sounds all around. The nice job they did really shines on “Three or Four” (track 11). I really love a punchy drum sound, and this song features a wicked syncopated guitar echo with the drums that works really well. You can tell, because I listened to it three times in a row on the first listen of the album, and I turned it up each time, until I was afraid the snare was going to make my eardrums bleed. Oh baby, it hurt so good.

In a previous life, when I actually played and recorded music, we had a few songs that involved a tremelo or echo on a guitar timed with a sharp drumbeat, and I always really loved the jumpy syncopated effect of that. I wish we had used it more.