I had the first version of that album and it's mastered and mixed horrendously. One of the worse albums I have ever heard - I emailed the mastering engineer and he said "McCartney wanted it like that..." and that he think he had learned from it because he rereleased it some years later with a much less brickwall compression.
I agree with you. I have a four-year degree in audio engineering technology and I think my college years (2004 - 2008) were some of the most hostile for audio recording. Listening back to Memory Almost Full, Paul's songs are fully there but there's that Strokes flat-as-a-pancake pastiche layered on top that's hard to hear through. There are moments where he breaks through (the middle bars of "Gratitude") but you can tell it's a fight for the dynamics from top to bottom.
I don't have a degree but my ears are pretty good at detecting the complete flatness of bass dynamics and destruction of all peaks as soon as the bass is played. Horrendous.
The degree was very interesting! It was a good mix of acoustics + electronic engineering. The first two years' base courses were a lot of math and physics mixed with more general biology/anatomy with a focus on how the entirety of the human body perceives sound. Then the latter upper-level courses were more hands on electrical engineering mixed with artistic theory. One one occasion, an actual graded exam consisted of our professor playing obscure recordings where we had to guess what month/year in which it was recorded based on the aesthetic and recording techniques, as well as technically describe as best as possible _how_ it was recorded. Cycling '74 was big at the time, and I first got into all of the audio engineering by messing around with Max/MSP/Jitter as a teen, which eventually led to a more stable programming career in Javascript, but I still enjoy audio engineering as a hobby.
"A Bigger Bang" by the Rolling Stones is another great example from that era of an album with great songs that was horribly recorded. It was remastered in 2009 but the original 2005 recording was intense. (The fact that it was remastered four years after release says a lot!) I recall record reviews at the time describing the mix as "rough and ready" but really it sounded half-finished to me. I think we can now look back on these records as artistic decisions associated with the era, which is interesting in itself.
