There's two things we've forgotten, Ned:
1) Side-chaining compression
This can be tricky to understand/master, but it's a good technic to use, especially with beat-heavy music.
Basically, if you put the kick drum on a seperate track, you feed into the side chain input for the compressor on the bass track/whole mix. When the kick drum plays, this causes the volume on the bass/mix to 'duck', so that the kick drum is more prominent. Therefore, you can get a really
massive kick drum, without peaking your mix too much.
(See
here for details).
2) Parallel compression.
I believe it was Stabbers who first put me onto this. Quite simply, what you do is produce an uncompressed track, and then a heavily compressed track, then mix the two together.
This can be applied to just the drum tracks, or to the whole mix. I apply it to the whole mix -- often, when using mastering compression (multiband), I find the bass of the kick gets squashed a little too much; however, leaving out mastering compression means the kick is too peaky. Parallel compression works well for me, and I can adjust the % mix of the compressed/non-compressed tracks to suit. It's also more subtle than side-chaining compression, which for me at least, tends to give mixes the techno-esque pumping which I despise.
(See
here for an explanation.)
Hope this helps!
Cheers