Caesar's Palace

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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: they're one of the best bands ever to do it, and Turunen's instrument & technique were something of a gold standard. ("Were," because she doesn't sing metal any more.) Singers who take Turunen's example as their model are plentiful within the genre, and some of them are quite good -- Floor Jansen, who succeeded her in Nightwish, is one. Jansen came to Nightwish from After Forever, the band she'd fronted since she was sixteen; plenty of  fans jumped ship on the band when she arrived, and it's true that she doesn't have Turunen's chops. What she can do that Turunen can't is death growls.

But what of the bands whose singers just sing? Within power metal fandom, such as it is -- the smaller the pond, the more vicious the fish -- an orthodoxy reigns: the purer the tone and technique, the better the singer. But I don't think the musicians who play in the bands really think of it this way, especially the Italian power metal bands, who offer a sort of third way, rooted in hard rock bands like Rainbow that strove to make rock operatic without, you know, getting properly operatic. Whether they made a different way owing to limitations isn't really the point; they made something new. I love Nightwish; Wishmaster is all-time for me; but my favorite power metal bands are the ones whose singers' technique is modest enough for me to hear the speaking voice behind the note. These bands sometimes follow suit musically, being technically adept by any standard but less virtuosic than the biggest names. I'd argue that this isn't simply a meritocracy where the most talented musicians rise to the top of the field, but a division within genre, an aesthetic distinction that probably begins with limitations of range and skill but proceeds from there into places the big fish can't swim. 


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