ozbird wrote:
Geoff Palmer wrote:
I've voted "Mostly female with some male". "A Life All Mine" works very well, and I see no reason why the band shouldn't go a little further down that road. Having said that, I tend to find female voices much more appealing than male voices. However, since I'm a bloke, that probably comes as no surprise.
I don't mean to suggest "beauty and the beast" - not for The Gathering as they are now.
I like "A Life All Mine" a lot, but consider it a special track where anything goes. For everything else, I like - and want - only a female voice, which is why I voted "Female only".
I don't think that preferring a female voice is a bloke thing. Male vocalists - especially in metal - are a dime a dozen, and most fans are also male. A female vocalist with metal (or metal-like) music is unusual - and occasionally special. I discovered TG
because of the female vocals; if they had a male vocalist ... well, I wouldn't be here.
While I agree that replacing Anneke with an "Anneke clone" would be a bad move, going for an "anti-Anneke" would be even worse. I think that Nightwish's choice of Annette Olzen is an excellent choice - A new future, while still doing justice to their back catalogue of music. I hope TG find a singer as equally versatile.
There's a lot of older "heavy" metal that I don't listen to - and the male vocals are often part of the reason why. Then, there's nu-metal. I don't listen to that either. The kind of male voices I like? Well, Garm/Trickster G. for one, Devin Townsend for another, and I quite like both Jonathan Davies and David Draiman - oh, and Maynard James Keenan - amongst others. But then it all goes a little more curious - Serj Tankian, Till Lindeman, Eric Fish of Subway to Sally, Teufel from Tanzwut ...
In recent years, I'd say that it's the female singers who've become a dime a dozen in metal - too many female-fronted gothic metal bands. Just a few stand out as distinctive ... But this is somehow irrelevant, unless TG turn back towards metal - which I can't see happening right now. Time may prove me wrong.
I think Nightwish have made a very good choice, and I also think we'll find that Marco sings a lot more.