Faith No More - Angel Dust (Reissue)
Nice. The remaster on this one is extremely subtle and there is really not much difference between the remastered tracks here and the original album from '92. That's probably a good thing as the original album was mastered almost perfectly for the CD format. I just picked up the 2008 remaster of Angel Dust, which is a much more radical remaster and reportedly is much different, but I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet. This one you've got here though that just came out this year is worth it for nothing more than the second disc of B-sides and live tracks-- it's nice to have them all in one place. My only real disappointment is they left off "The Perfect Crime," though, as this was an Angel Dust-era track from the soundtrack to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey.
I also picked up the remaster of The Real Thing, which sounds much different from the original release. The Real Thing was one of the albums in greatest need of a remaster, of all rock albums, ever, as the original had an absolutely atrocious mix. The new remaster has less dynamic range than the original but the mix is muuuuuccchhhh more balanced and has a healthy bottom end and loses the tinny, echo-y quality of the original. Basically they mixed it to sound like Angel Dust this time around, which is a really good thing. Some audophiles will only even look at a record if it's super spacious dynamically, but then again it's not brickwalled, it's right in the middle. Dynamics aside, it sounds much better, and truth be told even Angel Dust was always compressed to be somewhere in the middle right back to the original release. It seems this middleground is where this particular band's style of music sounds best.
If someone were to only buy one of the reissues, I'd recommend The Real Thing even though Angel Dust is the better album, just because The Real Thing benefits the most from the remaster job. If you want a remaster/remix of Angel Dust that sounds drastically different from the original, pick up the 2008 remaster instead.
This got a lot longer than I intended.... But to be on topic, I've been listening to both of these over the past few days and today I'm going to spin up the 2008 AD disc and see how I like it compared to the original and the 2015.
