The Three Suns - Here Come the Suns (1958)

The Three Suns were a trio that formed in 1939. They produced music throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s. An "easy listening" band, their music became most interesting once they signed to RCA in the late 50s. In my mind, they are the pre-eminent band in the whole "exotica/lounge" movement, even more so than Esquivel. The crazy stereo separation effects of their later Stereo Action records for RCA are particularly exciting for me. But, hey, I'm no expert. But you know who is? Michael David Toth of The Three Suns Universe. So go check out his page and get yourself all edjamacated.

For some unknown reason, RCA has never seen fit to release any of The Three Suns' LPs on CD. An unfortunate oversight, to be sure. I believe that the popularity of the retro lounge scene has peaked, so we may never see official releases. Sounds Fun! subsidiary label Astro Age has released four CDs (two singles and one double) of material by The Three Suns. These are not official releases and have been mastered from vinyl, but sound excellent. Because these releases are really bootlegs (which I paid for), I have no issue with putting them up here. The only real issue the discs have quality-wise is that the audio level is very low and fluctuates album to album. Many of the albums needed to be boosted by 12dB or more. I could have taken the easy route of ripping each track to .wav and just maximizing the level of each track individually. Easy, but wrong. So, after ripping to .wav, I used WaveGain, to maximize the levels. I used "album gain" mode to group normalize each album and single as a separate set of files to maintain the track-to-track audio differences of each LP or 45.

My plan is to eventually upload all eight releases. I figured I should do them in order. I probably won't do them in a row, though. The exception in my plan is A Ding Dong Dandy Christmas! LP, which I'll do out of order and last, hopefully in time for Christmas. One of the Astro Age discs has a group of "Rarities!" tracks tacked on to the end. I'm going to place these rarities chronologically at the end of certain LPs as bonus tracks. This first release is the four track Here Come the Suns 7" EP from 1958, with the two track Rainbow 7" single from 1959 thrown on as a bonus. Both of these are mono releases, but were mastered (and encoded) in stereo (dual mono, really). For more info on this release, including the original liner notes, check out its page over at Michael David Toth's The Three Suns Universe.

The Three Suns - Here Come the Suns (1958)
1. Harbor Lights (2:18)
2. The Message (2:17)
3. Kandy Kazoo (2:07)
4. Smoke Rings (3:00)
5. Rainbow (2:18)
6. Tweety (2:36)

22.37MB RAR archive
MP3: Variable bitrate (212.5kbps average)
Audiograbber 1.83.1 w/LAME 3.97 beta 2 (--preset fast extreme)

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