Queen of Time 2018

"I really wanted to like this one, and in all fairness, the I think the melodies here are great; I love the use of the Nazareth Arab Orchestra and Hellscore Choir (both of which were utilized by Orphaned Land in their 2018 release as well), and the compositions in general are quite good. Unfortunately, the engineering is absolutely atrocious, even by Bogrens' standards - seriously, this album is one of the worst-sounding I've ever heard, at least I thought so at first? The mastering is actually very inconsistent for some reason. In the middle of the album, I couldn't bear the clipping anymore and had to pause the music for a few minutes for a stimulation break, but by track 9, I was thinking that maybe I somehow misheard the music earlier, or my computer did something to compress it? Because the mastering didn't sound as bad at that point. No. As it turns out, after running a DR test on the album, some songs are literally more compressed than others, making the listening experience not only disorienting, but just uncomfortable. There's no excuse for this. Plain and simple, a half-assed master and overdone mixing such that everything clashes with each other. This really could have been decent, too. It's just frustrating to ruin otherwise good music like this... nice orchestrations, good use of harmonics, and memorable melodies. Why not brickwall it and make it unbearable?"