I've been listening to the preview of the album on Spotify, and in my opinion the mastering is fine. In fact I was quite excited as I started listening to track one, since it's a lot more dynamic than the last album, which was mastered at an unnecessarily high-level, and suffered as a result. However unfortunately the sound is still quite distorted in some places - I don't mind it too much on "Boots", for example, but "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" is a mess, and pretty tough going.
Of course the streaming data-compression won't be helping, so hopefully the CD will sound a little better. The fact that some tracks sound much more squashed and distorted than others strongly suggests that these were production decisions, NOT changes made in the mastering. Overall this is still a high-level album, but thankfully it's no Deaf Magnetic, either !
For anyone interested to find out more about the so-called Loudness Wars, I've blogged regularly about it recently. Posts that relate to some of the issue raised in this thread are:
Metallica "Death Magnetic" sounds better in Guitar Hero
Metallica "Death Magnetic" - Stop The Loudness Wars
Metallica "Death Magnetic" - Vinyl sounds better than CD
Chinese Democracy: The Loudness War Is Over - If We Want It
Want to know what the best-sounding U2 album is ? The original release of "Joshua Tree" - it's a little dull, like lots of their stuff, but crank it up and it blows most modern releases out of the water.
It's great to see that you guys care about this stuff !
Cheers,
Ian