A few points to comment on:
- It's very hard to draw conclusions about the mastering of an album without the source to compare it with.
- Having said that, some tracks on NLOTH are very squashed and distorted, but others are much cleaner and more dynamic, which suggests to me that the mastering has been faithful to the mixes - meaning, it's probably unfair to blame the mastering for what you're hearing. (Mastering is different from mixing - see
here.) At it's loudest points NLOTH is as loud as HTDAAB, but at other points it's quieter, whereas HTDAAB is pushed to the max throughout. The lower level of NLOTH is a step in the right direction, as far as level and the Loudness Wars are concerned.
- Having said
that, there is a slightly fuzzy distorted quality to the bass end throughout the Spotify preview of NLOTH. This may be a result of the mixes, or the mastering - we will probably never know - but lots of mixes are being delivered to the mastering studio like that these days, unfortunately.
- Singles are often mastered separately from albums, and sometimes differently. It's possible that the single for "Boots" was pushed harder for radio play, although would be a mistake. Check out the two examples from Deaf Magnetic in this
interview I did for Radio 4 - they sound a similar loudness over the air, even though the distorted CD version started out 10dB (!) louder. This was also demonstrated in far more detail by an Australian radio metal show - check out this
blog post. Lower-level CDs sound just as good (if not better) on the radio.
- The new Guns 'n' Roses album is called "Chinese Democracy", and although not everyone was happy about the production, the overall mix is considerably less compressed than the vast majority of released music these days, and the level on the CD is very conservative. More info
here.
Cheers,
Ian