Clean Vocals or Death Growl? (Modern Prog)

 

Yeah, I kind of mixed up growls with harsh vocals in my last post.  I think harsh vocals in general will continue to be used in music, at least for effect.  But I don't think growls can only be used to convey evil or horror; I'm a musician, and when I delve into the depths of the human soul I often find agonizing emotions that to me, seem to warrant a stanza or two of growling.  I think it depends on the musician/singer and the way in which he expresses himself.  Everyone experiences the emotions of love, grief, sadness, and many others in different ways, and I could see why two musicians in similar emotional situations might express themselves in two different ways, be that clean vocals vs. growls, screaming vs. yelling, or any other difference between the vocal style.  That's all part of what gives the world of music it's vast diversity; we were all created differently, we all express our emotions differently, and we all relate to different types of expression.  I would agree with you, though, that growls can often become over-the-top and used just to be brutal for brutality's sake, rather than to convey emotion.  They are also overused in modern metal music, which is one of the reasons I only use them sparingly in my own music. 

Of course if you only pay attention to mainstream metal you're going to find a bunch of garbage. Mainstream everything is garbage. You can't make a judgement call on an entire genre of anything if you're only going to scrape the surface.  

Salome put this album out in 2008. Tell me, does it sound "tame" to you?

Apart from that, the loudness, aggression and violence was new and exciting in the 80s. Instead of moving on, metal musicians have overspecialized in it and even got fussy over what kind of growls are the best or whatever to the point that it gets sterile and same-sounding.  It's interesting that in the 80s, metal was about pushing the frontiers of extreme-ness and then having done that, in the 90s, they got very concerned about how they are perceived and therefrom began the obsession with technicality in death metal, those so-called opera singers who can barely hold onto wobbly high As and so on and so forth.  I only ever got into metal for how starkly it portrayed the uglier shades of life - I am sure as a "rabid old school extreme metalhead" you know all about that  - but that has somewhere become less important and even 'un-intellectual' in metal, pity!