Yeah I’m like that aswell, guess they were going for a more compressed metal sound. I guess songs like Blackbird from the previous record do have a lot of natural dynamics so it is important to preseve them there.
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My copy of All The Right Reasons has an extremely beat jewel case from how long it lived in my car (yes I skip photograph nearly every time).
Side of a Bullet is my jam.
Chris Cornell is my favorite 90s singer by a mile, and one of my favorites regardless of decade, he’s probably the only famous person in my lifetime whose death really affected me and losing Chester a couple months later made 2017 absolutely rot. And the worst part is I can barely listen to some of my favorites now because the lyrics hit way too hard now.
Layne Staley and Chino Moreno would be my next favorites followed by Serj Tankian and Jeff Buckley
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ngl it does sound over compressed after comparing it to other stuff lol
Yeah for me there are two seperate things going on, and IMO it kind of fails both of them, but the second is much bigger a deal than the first.
The first is simply is the use of dynamics in a song effective. For me, a really quiet intro that, when the song kicks in, it doesn;t FEEL like things got louder and more intense, doesn’t really work… but that’s subjective and I definitely get not everyone is going to feel the same.
The second though is if you’re actively listening to something, on a good stereo system or on headphones, over time a really flat, squashed mix is physically tiring to listen to, because your ear isn’t used to hearing anything with no dynamic range. The first album I had this reaction to was RHCP’s Californication - I’d never loved the band but a buddy was really ito them and used to play that album a lot when we were working together, and i could never figure out why I actually liked a lot of the songs but there was just something viscerally offputting about the album for me that made it hard to listen to… until a decade lader reading an article about the “loudness wars” that waa flagged as an early offender. 
But, also, some people just seem to be not very sensitive to that kind of stuff. I have a buddy who released a self-produced album that he absolutely brickwalled, and to this day new music he works on continues to be absolutely smashed (though he’s moved to doing more heavy-handed compression in the mix before he even moves on to mastering). He loves how it sounds, it’s very “modern” to his ears. It’s physically painful to mine.
I guess I’m just not that metal. 
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ABIII? Yeah I mean the music is pretty good, I’d really love to hear it with a less aggressive master. 
I do definitely enjoy music that “breathes” a little. Tom Petty is one of my favorite artists and his Wildflowers album is one of my all time go-to’s. I didn’t know anything about audio engineering when I bought it in middle school. I just knew I liked the songs, and I think I took that approach with everything I listened to. Now I hear great tones, and sure, that’s not a squashed recording. There’s an “in the room with the band” vibe on the whole thing that I dig, and that would likely go out the window if they squashed it. There’s no “super quiet” or “super loud” parts though, not that type of recording.
It’s funny how knowing more about things changes our enjoyment though. “And Justice For All” was just so badass the first through the 1000th time I played it as a young teen. I didn’t realize there was no (audible) bass and the guitars had no mids. Same with Dimebag…I heard amazing riffs and the coolest solos in that genre imaginable. Now I can’t hear his stuff without being bothered by the mixes and his buzzy tone in general. Sort of a shame. Ignorance was bliss lol!
I’m wondering if the “fatigue” aspect of the more compressed stuff doesn’t bother me as much just because I don’t listen to things at a high volume in general 
I know when people cite the fatigue they don’t really mean “it hurts my ears”, but the volumes I choose, I can normally still hear background noises easily. The wife/kid asking me a question, an email alert tone, my stupid dogs barking out in the yard etc.