Modern production just needs to stop. It sucks the life out of a recording and is just terrible compared to the quite frankly excellent production quality of the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s.

meh...The vocals sounds too processed and their sound has been done countless times by 1000 other technical death metal bands out there.

Of course there's crappy sounds in that era too (see Darkthrone), but as a whole that era of metal music had overall infinitely better sounds. What was considered polished and plastic back then can now be seen as organic and natural compared to some of the crap mixes being done nowadays. There was no loudness war, no brickwalling, no real way of tweaking a record to sound like it was made by a machine and not real people. It was just overall better.

Yeah after listening to it again, Dave Culross is gonna crush this album. I mean, c'mon, DESPISE THE FUCKING SUN. In a way, this is the going to be the album that should have been the full-length after said EP.

Especially Blaze, Funeral Moon, Hunger, Panzerfaust and Total Death have magnificent production jobs. A lot of the death metal production jobs from that particular era are really lacking in the lower frequencies.

See, that new track, 2:21 - 2:52 sucks for a Suffocation riff and beat. Also, somehow I feel Mike Smith would have covered this with rolls, whereas there are good 10 - 20 seconds stretches here of just straight blasting, with rolls in the riff transitions. I didn't really think Culross was a good fit for Suffocation, and this sort of proves my point, though I hope the other songs are better. Who would I have picked for drummer? Not sure...

FWIW, my fave albums: #1 BtS, #2 S/T (yes, I like that it's fucking... BEAUTIFUL), #3 PFW, #4 BO

I'm mostly not a big fan of Culross' drumming. It's beastly but didn't fit with the Suffocation sound on Despise the Sun and it doesn't here.

Smith was also a big part of the reason they were holding back so much on Blood Oath. His mindset is that if the kids want easy deathcore, that's what he should deliver. Culross is more normal and less creative than Smith, but at this point Smith seems to be concerned solely with profit and not with writing good music that he enjoys.

Most likely. As said, modern album production just kinda sucks compared to the quite frankly excellent death metal sounds of the 90s.

Not only does it look like JFAC's last album, but it sounds like it too. Both in terms of riffs and production.

For that, we need analog. But we have to blame the producer completely for such jobs because it is within their power to replicate that distinctive sound.

For that, we need analog.

For all the good that DAWs and modern technology have provided us, such as easier, less ridiculously time consuming tracking and mixing sessions, it's also brought about some really bad things, like the Loudness War and every album coming out nowadays sounding identical.

that computer generated artwork

Like I said, this has nothing to do with the Loudness Wars™, and certainly nothing to do with analog vs. digital either. This is purely a case of evolved production tastes. The guitarists decided on a meh tone, and the band as well as the engineer decided for a mixing plan that unavoidably made it worse. It's that simple. They could've very easily replicated the tone from say Pierced from Within, and they didn't, because they probably didn't want to, or didn't care, or it didn't cross their minds. Not because modern technology is evil and soulless and shit.

both of y'all.