And the winner is: 2004 remaster, by a hair. Well here we go again: another instance of an album which originally had great dynamics getting sonically crushed by the heavy hand of Loudness War era digital remastering. How bad is the result this time? In all honesty, it's surprisingly good. I'm actually tempted to say that the remaster has a slight edge over the original CD release, though it's by no means a blowout. The original release is perfectly fine, and it's the one I've listened to bits and pieces of for the past couple of decades. It sounds okay, but the deluxe remastered version does strike me as sounding slightly clearer, cleaner, and overall marginally better. This seems to be another instance in which a better transfer from the original master tapes ends up trumping an earlier transfer from what was likely a production copy of the master tapes. This is a bit surprising given the look of the waveforms when comparing between the two versions of the album. I wouldn't go out of my way to obtain a copy of the remaster if the original Lookout! Records disc is readily available, but it's not a bad choice especially given the presence of the added audio and video selections buried deep in its enhanced CD folder structure. You'll need a (very much) legacy computer to play them using the included app, but if you have a machine with an optical drive, you can find them saved on the disc as mp3 and mov (QuickTime) files.

As a somewhat sassy aside, this album has always worn out its welcome for me long before I've reached the end, with the entire listening experience devolving into a long string of monotonously similar numbers beginning very early into its run. I can tell them apart - this isn't a parade of cookie monster type metal selections here - but hearing them one after the other does get tiresome very quickly. As far as I am concerned, Green Day didn't really hit their stride until they recorded Dookie two albums later.