...But then decided to be more grown up and a little more disciplined. Listened and focused one one thing the whole way through, like say the interaction of the bass and kick, taking notes* along the way. Then listened another time, this time maybe trying to hear clashing/masking sounds between guitars and vocals. Repeat ad naseaum, still taking notes. Followed through on said notes. Stuff like that.
I've still got a ways to go (background vocals on this one in particular, then there's those four other tunes, damn it!), but I think this mix is an improvement over the last one:
What changes did I make? Among dozens of other tiny things:
- eased up a bit on low-cuts on the rhythm guitars; tweaked the EQ so they're a bit thicker sounding, but still clear
- doubled-up on compression (using two or more compressor plugins, each doing a bit less "squishing") on the bass and the lead vocal
- slicing up and sliding around the more egregious timing errors (after deciding that I'd rather throw it all away than re-track
)- created a send to an aux track for the bass wherein I added some distortion; shaped the distorted aux track with EQ, rolling off below 700hz (and above ~3k), then fading the distorted aux track in until it added a bit of clarity to the bass line but didn't interfere with other stuff
*An interesting thing I learned about taking notes during critical listening: I think I do better if the notes are things like "the rhythm guitars are a little thin here, could use more heft" than if my notes read "need to boost low-mids here". My notes should identify the problems, but not specify the solutions; I'll get to the solutions when I'm in "fix it" mode.
Why? I (naturally?) want to fix stuff while I'm listening, but if I do that, then I'm not really listening as carefully as I should be, right?
(At this point, with these tunes, I truly dread re-tracking...) I used the 
to know that I did enough editing so the timing issues aren't noticeable.