Caesar's Palace
The impulse to categorize music is both natural and suspect and there's a lot one might say about that but in the interest of brevity there are two kinds of power metal singers: operatic and popular. Popular? Yes; I don't see recourse to a better term. Operatic we understand: a big voice, a lot of control, to-die-for vibrato, inerrant pitch. "Popular" for me here just means "more in the legacy of rock singers than classically trained singers," which is funny because rock really isn't popular, but what would you suggest? Pedestrian? Untrained? "Normal?" I'll die first. Operatic, anyway, is the default assumption: and while the proto-power-metal belters like Bruce Dickinson clearly had their aspirations, the operatic model finds deep roots in Tarja Turunen, who did in fact study voice at Helsinki's Sibelius Academy and who has a three-octave range. Her old band, Nightwish, casts a great shadow on all power metal that comes after them: th...