Psalmist35, your observations are 100% correct. I do think they should re-record it as well. With the same gear, it wouldn't take twice the time remix it. They wouldn't even need to do the vocals again, or even the bass.
There's some real unfortunate things that happened with this song I think. I don't know the details about *how* this was recorded, but I do know it was the band's first time. You can infer that the band looks to the drummer for timing... and I'm going to take a wild guess and say that this was probably the first time he/she used a click track. I think that's why the intro is so sluggish and takes them a bit to get moving... not exactly good for recording.
Which leads me to my next guess - they may have only did a few takes due to studio time limitations. It's too bad that they didn't have all the time necessary to get the correct recording.
Also, the guitar recordings are really, really bad. The original recordings I got had hums, buzzes, and noise. Also, most of the sound of the rhythm guitars is mud or cheap distortion on top of a tinny-sounding guitar. Apparently very good mics were used, so my guess is that the actual guitar or amp was not very good at all. It is impossible to boost at all with EQ on these recordings.
My solution was just to cut massive amounts of bad sound... and ironically, since I got the bass to sound fantastic, it kind of fills 3 roles - bass, groove and even filling in the rhythm tones that the guitar tracks are not providing.
For a song that is mostly well conceived, I'm not sure how/why the band thought this intro was effective. I am tempted to just start deleting entire bars and get the listener to start hearing the song as the timing issues between the drums, the guitar and the bass are too much to ignore, especially for the average listener. It doesn't really make a good first impression.
Having said all of that, my job is to mix ;) I can't really do anything except for mute, cut and delete... and I'm not sure how to proceed with this intro :(
I'll just have to wait and see what the band says. I should know soon.