[Glathannus]

Any Tokyo Jihen album after Kyoiku has more dynamics than Shiina Ringo's albums from 2014. Going back and revisiting Variety; becomes refreshing in the sense that at least the album isn't attacking my ears.

Brickwalling isn't just about being loud. It's like turning up the contrast in a picture/video to where blacks and whites become more pronounced, but you lose a lot of greyscale. There are ways you as a consumer can make any existing music sound like this (even if you didn't record it yourself), but there's not much the pro-dynamics listeners can do if the dynamics are already gone. Maybe run the music through a tube amp, but that would at best soften the blow, and couldn't be done portably.

It's a very legitimate problem for people to complain about.