I can't say I was surprised.
The wave forms are so sausage-shaped they should call themselves The Black Puddings.
The Black Keys - No Rain, No Flowers UNPROCESSED
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The compressors were NOT set to stun.
Wet Leg - 2025 - moisturizer ORIGINAL
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Mastering choice no. 1 Take the already not very dynamic recording (all the drums/percussion are programmed) and throw the full weight of a digital compressor at it. Job done.
Chris Gehringer (main mastering engineer)
Will Quinnell (assistant mastering engineer)
It took two. One to squash the music into the can and the other to get the lid on. Nice work if you can get it.
Lorde - Virgin UNPROCESSED
That's not mastering, it's being mastered - a pair of cloth ears. Call themselves engineers; they will be redundant shortly when Ozone introduces an AI mastering suite.
Remember when Crowded House's Woodface was one of the best sounding CDs you owned? Maybe it still is? Well, the voice is familiar (one generation apart) and so is the sound and quirky songwriting—maybe more akin to Together Alone and later albums—but what happened to the audio?
It is truly atrocious.
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😖😖