sigma,
This is the same post I made to your question in the recording forum.. in case you missed it.
What you're asking about is one of the primary functions of mastering... making sure all of the songs are relative in terms of level, loudness, and sonic continuity. When I was in mastering we did it by notating the levels of every song.. peaks and valleys... then finding a common denominator for all of the tracks.. ie compression, limiting, eq, multi-band compression/limiting, etc.
If you have DAW editing program such as Sound Forge, Wavelab, CEP, etc... the tasks are a lot easier because you can manually knock down transients that might cause a compressor some fits. If you're doing everything on the 2480, automate a quick fader movement to knock down a transient. After you've achieved somewhat "even kieled" wave forms, you can apply some eq, compression/and or limiting to all of the tracks to provide that extra little kick and to also provide some sort of sonic common denominator. Sometimes even a tad bit of reverb can help... I'm talking a tad bit.. mainly to get the characteristics of the reverb unit and not necessarily the reverb effect itself. Normalize if you really feel the need, but only at the very last. If you do normalize, it's imperitive that you've gone through the program material and taken care of stray transients.