Fun Stuff > BAND
women and music
KvP:
Ah yes, the white man's handwave
KharBevNor:
--- Quote from: ALoveSupreme on 02 Mar 2011, 07:56 ---"The band made use of contrasting vocals (commonly referred to as "Beauty and the Beast" vocals)" - their wiki page
--- End quote ---
ToT invented the 'Beauty and the Beast' aesthetic (female clean singer, male growler), but it was a concept that had a pretty short hey-day. By the early 00's a lot the original bands were dropping the growler entirely (often as part of the mysterious millenial gothic metal die-off where everyone decided that they'd make more money being third-rate darkwave bands). It's still an incredibly popular form of metal though, in Europe anyway, given that Cradle of Filth and Nightwish are both in a way exponents. Actually, it's more common nowadays to find a band with two dedicated male singers. Of course, contrasting clean and growled vocals wasn't entirely a new idea (I am not sure when it was first done, the earliest example I can think of off the top of my head is Edge of Sanity's song 'Enigma', from 1992's Unorthodox, but I'm sure there must be earlier examples). The male/female thing probably pioneered the idea of consistently duetting though.
It's maybe interesting to consider the contrast between bands where a female vocalist sings in a stereotypically female style (ie soprano) and bands such as Nuclear Death, Sacrilege, Acid King* and of course Arch Enemy. Look at the contrast between Angela Gossow and someone like Tarja Turunen. Tarja will always appear very feminine: dresses, pale make-up, etc. and deports herself somewhat like an opera singer. She is not in any way a frontwoman (frontperson?), whereas Angela dresses and acts pretty much like a male singer from a melodeath band would. (Interestingly, Nightwish's new singer dresses like a rock chick, moves about the stage and does crowd banter).
BTW, when you're talking about ToT's singer, are you talking about Nell Sigland or Liv Kristine? There's a pretty important difference in vocal quality in my mind.
*Another band where the sole female member is the lead guitarist, as well as vocalist.
EDIT: Thinking about it, one might actually say Cradle of Filth in some ways provide an interesting twist on the standard gender roles associated with beauty and the beast vocals (where we might expect the woman to be a victim and the growler sexually predatory), in that Dani Filth's 'character' is just as likely to be the victim of Sarah Jezebel Deva's 'character' as vice versa.
Patrick:
If Dragonforce had a female lead, I still wouldn't give an honest shit about Dragonforce.
Elysiana:
Sorry, I was speaking of Liv. I pretty much wrote them off after their first couple of albums because I couldn't stand her voice, so I wasn't even aware that they had a new vocalist. The new gal definitely sounds much different, as does their music.
It's funny, Nightwish became so absolutely huge because of Tarja's classically trained voice, but they've really moved away from that like they want to forget it happened. I feel that so many metal bands have migrated towards sounding more mainstream and having a more Evanescence-like flair, and I don't know if that's just a natural progression or if it's because Evanescence's popularity was enticing. It's frustrating to me because I don't care for them and I'm tired of people saying "I love gothic metal, Evanescence is so good!"
Also, Karyn Crisis. Nobody's gonna say she sounds like Anneke van Giersbergen or Floor Janssen haha. I really do, though, think that a lot of the confusion comes in with similarly-styled music. The people who say this person sounds just like that person are usually the ones who have trouble distinguishing between different types of music to begin with.
Johnny C:
yeah man i mean that's kind of part & parcel of almost all discourse
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