I hope it is a fault with your system and not the mix
I have spent some more time with the mixes now. I am still not impressed, but I think I can put more facts to it now. Needless to say that the remix improves in clarity and detail over the original mix, which was very low volume for once (on my CD, it is not even normalized) and sometimes muddy in comparison, but which had more focus on the vocals. I find that that is often an issue with remixes - they try to bring out all the unheard details, and then those details distract from the vocals. To a certain extent this is the case here, although it is tolerable. I do not care much for obviously changed elements, like the new guitar sound on A View From A Hill intro, or added percussion elements in the low part in the middle of Cliché, or the changed running order; but it does not bother me much as well. It is not so obvious why they changed those though, maybe there is something in the book about it.
I took a closer look at Vigil (the album). First, the stereo mix by Calum Malcolm and the Surorund mix bei AB&AM are two completely different pairs of shoes regarding compression/loudness, but I think they share a lot of sonic characteristics and (for me) strange mixing decisions. Throughout the mix, I feel the high frequencies are boosted a little too much. This gives the mix a lot of clarity the original mix was lacking, but often enough hi-hats and ride pings are way too much in your face, kind of distracting (and I am a drummer, I like hearing drum details!). Listen to the beginning of The Company or Cliché to get a good impression of that. It sounds to me like this mix was done by somebody who already lost a good part of upper frequency hearing... did Uncle Fish push the upper registers too far? ;-) The overall mix gets a sharpness from that that I do not like so much.
Then the vocals... as said before, they get a little shoved aside by the new shiny details, but even more so as a lot of very noticeable reverb was put to them. I sometimes feel that the mix fails in bringing forward the best of the characteristics of Fish's voice, like when you choose the "wrong" microphone for a specific type of voice. Maybe it is also the high frequency push that takes the warmth from the big guy. What they put on reverb to the vocals they took from the drums, btw. The old mix had a lot of reverb on drums (as usual at that time), today we prefer a much more direct drum sound, and the remix reflects that. The reverb-y drum sound made the original mix sound thin at times, but on the other hand it made room for the bass guitar, which is now pretty much burried in the mix. Overall, there is more bass frequencies in the mix, so drums sound fuller, bass sounds warmer, but you can hear less of the individual bass notes now, which is a shame, because I think a lot of it was played on a fretless bass, which is interesting to listen to.
What really sucks is the dynamic range of the stereo mix. I thought the 2000s were behind us, but look for example at Big Wedge - remix on top, normalized original mix below.
This is a loud song anyway and the picture is more here to illustrate the point, but this kind of dynamic compression takes the air out of "heroic" moments like the second refrain from The Company, the reverbed drum intro to the grand finale of Clichè, or the full band rocking in View From A Hill ("You were a dancer and a chancer..."), as marked by the arrow in this screenshot: normalized original mix at the bottom, remix on top reduced by 6 dB to get close to similar perceived loudness.
The snare sound suffers from the compression, the punch is often lost. To me the stereo remix is already at the point of tiring my ears.
What did AB&AM make out of that for their surround mix? Something quite different dynamically. This is View From A Hill - Front Left and Front Right at the top, then Center, then the stereo remix. The channels from the surriund mix are normalized (or more precisely pushed by 9 dB) by the way, because the volume of the surround mix is kept so low. There is definitely more dynamics in the surround mix, although not as much as in the original mix, but maybe that is not the reference for today.
Different things puzzle me about the surround mix. Here you see the full album in 5.1:
First of all, the LFE channel is simply a very low pass filtered version of the overall mix. You can hear rumble and some bass drum there, but no carefully crafted LFE. I am wondering if they don't have all the individual tracks anymore - if you only want bass drum on the LFE, then why not only put bass drum there? But it is so low on volume that I would consider this more of a 5.0 mix anyway. The center is mostly front left and right with the vocals pushed forward. The rear channels somehwat copy what is on front channels minus the vocals and in lower volume, and then put something on top of that (keys, rhythm guitar, bagpipes). Sometimes it is fun, but I feel they missed the chance for a clearer separation, and in loud scenes it gets a little muddy. Yes, the synth orchestra in the finale of Cliché is there, but it so low on volume, why not blow the listener (emotionally) away from the back here? Same with A Gentleman's Excuse Me. The Voyeur on the other hand does exactly that with synths and guitar highlights, and even backing vocals in the refrain. So it is a little of a mixed bag. Sometimes you can use the rear channels as a karaoke track, because the full band except the vocals is in there.
So all in all this is not a bad surround mix, maybe not even lackluster, but seems to me like a safe play for all those without full range speakers in the back, and missing alot of opportunities. There is a number of individual things I would have expected differently, especially when you look at the audience. This is not some charting band also pushing out a quick spatial mix on the side so that Apple Music has something to offer. This was crafted deliberately as a final gift to the fans - and not so much of a gift when you look at the price tag.
Does anyone know if the album was recorded on tape originally? The remix of Vigil (the song) is about half a second longer than the original mix, so I guess that is tape speed deviation (similar pattern for the other songs).