I'm not a professional, but have done a lot of amateur recording on pro-tools/other rigs with my band.
I will agree, that the album does have some things going for it...the imaging and fullness on some songs really blew me away the first couple times thorugh.

But I have to agree with others that this album is WAY over-compressed...all you have to do to see it is rip a WAV of Vicarious, then rip one of The Grudge. Look at the amplitude differences, and then look at the plateau that is Vicarious or any other song on the album.

Secondly, run an analysis/statistics in Cool Edit on any song on the album. There is clipping ALL OVER THE PLACE. The compression itself would not bother me at all if it werent' for all the crackling. Seems like every time danny hits his floor toms, or adam's guitar picks up, we get all kinds of digital crackling...I really did not expect this from such a great band. Some say they can't hear it...I personally don't know how you could miss it a moderate/high volume. I can hear it on my Klipsch RF-3 II speaks, Grado headphones, Focal car speaks, Promedia computer speaks..it's there on the disc, and it was there on the leak.

Anyway, although I do like the overall sound of the album, I think the over-compression/clipping knocks it down quite a bit. Hopefully this is resoved some day with a high-res release.