What makes you say, "Oh yeah, now this is cheeeeezy!!"

In my salad days I separated "real" punk and hardcore from "sellout pop shit" by distinguishing bands that didn't use the vocal processing du jour from those who did. Reverb, slapback delay, and modulation were obvious signs of a band's "major label era" (whether literally or sonically), which often coincided with weaker songs and the appearance of heavy metal guitar licks. So yeah, 80s/90s vocal effects.

Douche snare

rock band recordings too much "on the grid"
Nothing wrong with playing to a click, but copy and paste assembly of songs in the DAW is just gross and sterile. If you are a rock band, rehearse and play that shit through! I am certainly guilty of this shit (especially during the past couple years where getting together wasn't possible) and I hate it.

Too much separation, processing, over fixing, compressing, and an over emphasis on vocals (which are likely double/triple tracked)

It used to be hair metal was my defacto standard for cheesy production. Now it's stuff that sounds like bad religion

I don’t know exactly how to explain this, but:

My daughter yesterday was excited to play a song for me. She was like, “This is metal, right?”

It was this overly slick, fake anger sounding stuff. Kinda like that Hasselhoff song someone posted on the “That’s it for me” thread.

I didn’t have the heart to tell my daughter how much I thought it sucked. I think I explained it as Walt Disney metal. Or something like that.

Yeah, that was cheesy.

As a child of the 80s:

- Gated reverb
- Gated snare
- Heavily reverbed-out vocals - usually with an REV-7 or other low-cost 80s digital rackmount reverb
- Chorus, on anything (and too often, everything), but particularly acoustic guitar
- DX-7 anything, but particularly piano and bell sounds
- Roland sampler orchestra hits
- Alesis drum machine sounds
- Heavily compressed bass and drum tracks
- keytar sawtooth synth pads
- heavily comped vocal tracks without harmonization (Def Leppard were the masters of this technique, and probably the reason studios needed a second 2" machine with SMPTE synch)
- gratuitous use of an Eventide harmonizer on guitar or keyboard

The aesthetic of they day was that if you patched enough shit together in line and added enough EQ, the combined phase distortion and noise would make all your boring real-world sounds into a magical coked-out soup of smooth shiny aural bliss. That everything digital was operating at a 7 to 12 bit word depth was just icing on the coke-cake.

I'll probably think up more as they day goes on....

Cocaine may have been the most widely used signal processor in the 70s and 80s.

Someone should design a patch or pedal or whatever called "Coke-Box."

These days it sounds to me like a band afraid to be heard as they are. Most studio processes are a series of deals people make to sound like their best selves and rightfully so. But there is a level of doctoring- vocal tuning, grid editing, drum sample adding, signal processing where you can no longer imagine what it would sound like in a rehearsal room. It's become a wax museum replica.

Any 1-2 of those glosses- especially applied specifically and therefore sparingly- would not achieve this audible falseness. It sounds like someone giving over to the idea that it's too abstract to identify anything wrong to fix, so instead treat every element and then sleep at night knowing the document is mathematically right. It's like someone tired of looking for blemishes in their photo so they just pick a color and click 'fill'.