Here's another controversial opinion: JP doesn't seem to have an idea of what's a good sounding record. ADTOE and DT both attribute to the truth of this statement.
Try listening to Caught In A Web for example, and then switch to Behind The Veil(after the intro). Massive difference in clarity, power, instrument definition. A 20 year old record sounds so much better than their most recent one.
I agree. This is further shown by the contrast between ADTOE/DT12 and the albums produced by JP along with MP. SFAM and 8VM are right up there with
Awake and FII as their best produced albums, IMO. ADTOE isn't awful but it's not great either and DT12 is just not that good (yes, I have the HDTracks). Meanwhile even SC, which is brickwalled, sounds rather good on the HDTracks and therefore seems to be mixed very well.
I think what LALP and DT12 show us is that JP has a (probably unconscious) mixing bias. The guitar on both those releases is higher than it really needs to be, and in the case of DT12, there are times when I can hardly hear Jordan. I don't like the outside producer idea because I don't think the band would be comfortable with it at this point, but I think if Jordan became co-producer (like how John and Mike used to be co-producers), we might get some more even mixes and possibly an overall higher quality sound. I also think that they should get a engineer known for making great-sounding prog metal albums and allow this engineer to speak freely on his views of sound quality, in the case that the guys really can't hear the difference between something that's annoyingly compressed and something that sounds nice, which is entirely plausible.
DT needs more sexual lyrics.
One Light Fuse and Get Away is enough for me, thanks. And besides, the only time you could even say they've gotten overtly sexual (because LFAGA is buried under so much innuendo that it's hard to tell, and Voices is just a brief mention in a couple of lines) is Anna Lee, and that was a rather different type of sexual lyrics.