The Latest

Picked up Cheap Trick's The Latest last night. Just about done with the first listen, and man, did they pick a sucky mastering engineer. It's way too compressed. Makes them sound like some no–talent pop act. To make sure I wasn't nuts, I opened it in Cacophony to look at the waveform and yup, it's mostly black—very few valleys. That's too bad. There are some great songs on it, but the overall sound is crappy. Track 2, When the Lights are Out, even has some weird synth that plays along with the lead licks that makes it sounds like there are heavy digital compression artifacts, as if they recorded it, converted it to some really low bit rate mp3, and put that on the record. It almost hurts my ears.

The good news is that the new Wolfmother album is fan–fucking–tastic! I also got a new Drive-by Truckers release called The Fine Print, which is a collection of rare stuff. And 2 older Rammstein albums that I didn't have and the brand new one. Haven't spun those yet. Heh, iTunes didn't even use the non–porno version of the album cover.