Holy crap who was that? I remember excitedly listening to a Baroness album when i learnt that Seb from Trans Am had joined on drums and thinking that the production was absolutely broken. Clipped to hell for sure. Baffling. I never looked into it. How could such a thing happen and I wonder if the mastering engineer had words or even just the studio / mix engineer(s) . Or the band for that matter.

Are you talking about Dave Fridmann? He isn't in the band but he produced a lot of flaming lips (and many other albums for other bands too) albums. Would be weird to hate spoon, ok go, mgmt, mogwai, tame impala for the same thing imo.