Album Rating: 3.5 | Sound Off

GR is hands down. Go fuck yourselves.

Album Rating: 3.0

It is.

Album Rating: 3.0

She is correct, though.

Album Rating: 3.5

Unfortunately couldn’t hold on to my 4 rating. Production totally drags it down for me... Could have been so much better with proper mastering. I really can’t comprehend how Mikael could simply neglect it. I mean, you should expect to learn a thing or two when it comes to production if you collaborate with Steven Wilson on some records.

Album Rating: 3.0

Agreed hard, that's the biggest issue here hands down.

Album Rating: 3.0

Word.

I would even go further and remove the "modern" part.

Pale Communios is their best prog album and one of their best

Album Rating: 3.0

They went from the almost miraculous mastering of Heritage and PC to the mud slog of Sorceress and Cauda to a lower extent. Nuclear Blast is evil itself, and they've always been. Death's TSoP was released under Nuclear Blast and guess what, the mastering sucked donkey balls already in 1998.

Album Rating: 3.5

nuclear blast didn’t do the mastering though. and it looks like the person who mastered this isn’t the same guy who mastered icv

Album Rating: 3.5

ICV doesn't sound bad to me tbh. Heritage's production rules so damn hard though

Album Rating: 3.0

Omg yes, Heritage has the best production job. Truly gorgeous, makes all of it come to life.

For some reason most bands have no idea about sound or something... Seems weird to me, but I guess you can get very 'stuck' with the audio you've produced, and not really hearing that it sounds so bad. Happens to me when making music as well. It's weird that they always had good to stellar production until they made Sorceress

Album Rating: 3.0

Yeah exactly, and I remember Mikael saying he really LOVED the production job they did. So weird.

Can we add Baroness to the conversation

Album Rating: 3.0

"nuclear blast didn’t do the mastering though. and it looks like the person who mastered this isn’t the same guy who mastered icv"



Point is any album NB touches sounds garbage and it's been so since quite literally forever. Perhaps some have great mixes but the mastering on NB albums is almost always atrocious. Then again you could say the same for the average rock/metal/pop release in general sadly, but NB often doubles down with plastic ass production.

Album Rating: 3.0

Yeah I agree with that, such a pity but it does happen. Alcest never had any production issues, but they sign with NB and voilà: there's this nagging feeling of something being off. Truly annoying.

Album Rating: 3.5

I don't think the production on Spiritual Instinct is worse than their other production jobs tbh.

But there has to be a reason why so many NB records have bad production.

Album Rating: 3.0

It's not at all dramatically off or anything, still really like it, but it's the first time I felt something was a little too slick and plastic sounding for Alcest. Never had even the slightest feeling of that before with them, yet they sign with NB and it immediately happens.

Album Rating: 3.5

Ah, I think I get it, could be a bit of a biased opinion though, since NB has such a bad reputation in terms of production jobs

Album Rating: 3.0

Yeah possibly. But it feels like you hear their style ever so slightly in the mix.