i miss the Daily Show and Colbert Report so much, but trying to watch them on the web still sucks painfully. Between the endless repeating ads and the stuttering buffering, it's almost impossible to watch and try to catch up and it makes me sad.
*wonders if i have time to catch Samantha Who? on abc.com*

I got my hands on that new album too. I like it a lot, and I'll even go as far as saying that it's one of their three (or four, if you count the CD version of Dead Letter Office and Chronic Town as one), but with an asterisk.

While it's refreshing to hear that REM did manage to pick their rock back up after they dropped it several years ago, the one thing that I don't like about this album is the same complaint I have about most major label releases these days. It's mastered way too loud, like they ran everything through compression or hard limiting to boost the lower frequencies to the same level as the highs (i.e., "optimized for iTunes", where everything is compressed beyond belief anyway). All of the dynamic has been stripped away, leaving the listener with... an earache.

As a point of comparison, I listened to Monster again for the first time in quite some time, and that album managed to be loud without being LOUD. I also grabbed a leaked advance copy off of BitTorrent after I bought the CD just to see. The differences in sound quality between the 192kbps MP3 files I downloaded (and deleted shortly afterward), the alt--preset insane (320kbps) LAME-encoded MP3s or the uncompressed (1411.2kbps - Red Book standard) WAVs that I ripped myself are totally indiscernible.

This more than likely isn't REM's fault, But I thought that they'd have a little more clout with the record company that would enable them to refuse to make their stuff sound louder than everything else on the radio these days. It's a damn shame that their best album in years has to suffer from such a terrible post-production hack job.

Or maybe it's not loud at all and I'm too old?

one of their three or four best albums, even. Whoops. :)

Yay. Peter Buck mentions the Minutemen. Rawk.