Stand Up and Shout: The Vocals Thread

Wagomu

Often, when I speak to people about music, vocalists are the make it or break it part of the band. Our voice is the most potently human thing we can inject into music as both a sound and source of ideas. This is a thread to discuss the nature of vocals in music as well as picking out our favorite singers and lyrics.

A real live attempt at a discussion to start this thread I made:

Lyrics really have an odd power in music. I'm used to listening to a lot of music where understanding vocals is both difficult and usually unimportant as a result. I've learned to accept lyrics as being a delivery mechanism for the vocal performance. When they come into focus, though, they can take a perfectly great song, musically, and change your perception on it so easily. For example:

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I love this song's sound and I love the vocal performance, but I've got to blur the lyrics in my mind because I just can't stand them. On the other hand, I can get into a song like this:

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And the lyrics here are even worse! Laughably bad, even. It's mostly just cursing and broken english, but it's some of the greatest death/thrash to have ever been released. And even though I laugh about the lyrics with my roommates a lot, they still never interfere when I listen because only the occasional "fuck" registers. On yet another hand, some music is absolutely made by the lyrics:

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I put the Mountain Goats as my second favorite band of all time and they do it mostly by lyrical prowess alone. John Darnielle can really inject meaning into his sound, which adds such a strong emotional effect to his music.

How do you guys feel about lyrics in music?

Sarfallet

I set a pretty high standard for vocals, lyrics especially… So often lyrics are just so damn uninspired and it's usually so damn obvious. I prefer instrumental in most cases.
In silly music like disco and stuff I don't mind boring and bad lyrics in though. Usually automatically filter them out from the experience all together. :P

My standard for lyrics is Carl Michael Bellman... Not only does he kick ass with his rhyming but he sings about drinking, sex, life and death in 18th century Stockholm... He also does it with an host of fictional characters and ancient gods that makes his songs/poems a sort of alternative reality that you follow in 147 of his pieces.

Here's a translation by Paul Britten Austin:[hide]
FREDMANS EPISTLE NO.72
Left at Caisa Lisa's bedside, late on evening

Glimmering nymph, glances so sparkling,
Hovering wraith on pillows darkling,Innocent temptress,
Come, come now to vespers;
By a candle's waxy heap,
Morpheus worship, god of sleep.
Cock'd is the door, the shutter in place is;
Drowsy thy head a nightcap embraces;Now Norström's old peruque
Its rusty nail doth seek.
Slumber, sweet nymph, to my musique!

Hear how the finch softly doth cease her
Twittering air, my Caisa Lisa.Dark in this sunset hour
See how the heavens lour;
Solitude and silence reign;
I'll to fröja's court again.
Drenching the rain in lightning flashes;
Vaulting the sky a rainbow splashes,And casts its silent sheen
Of purple gold and green
After the earth Jove's lightning has seen

Slumber, my nymph! Dream of my lyreUntil at four our sun's early fire
Wakens thy drowsy charms,
Reaching with am'rous arms
To my tankard and my name,
Warms thee to my blood and flame.
Caisa, thou diest! Ah, yet she is breathing!
Dying we live, and love our life's weaving.But if thy pulse beats light
Closed is thine eyelid quite.
Music, enough! - Good night! Good night!
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I find him a very good translator, but in his own words…
Ok, I dont remember the words but they were something to this effect: "He who only knows Bellman through translation only knows a quarter". :)

Oh, and here's the same epistle sung in Swedish by Fred Åkerström:(Starts at 1m and 40s)

Sorikai33

I guess lyrics are important to me, though a lot of time I don't really pay that much attention to them. In most cases, I don't feel like they add or detract from my like or dislike of a given song. Unless of course the lyrics are goofy enough to actually be distracting, but that doesn't happen that often.

On the other hand though, how a vocalist actually sounds is very important to me. I derive much of my musical enjoyment from how the instruments interact with one another. In that sense, the vocals are just another puzzle piece, and therefore have to have a good working relationship with all the other parts of the music.

I'm sure I've said this at least once before, but one of my favorite vocalists in Simone Simons from Epica. Operatic female vocals are pretty commonplace in symphonic metal, but she has always stood out to me because of the way she is able to weave various emotions throughout the song. How well these emotions are conveyed in the lyrics I often don't know, but I guess that's one of the reasons I tend to ignore the lyrics themselves. So that I can just take the feelings of the music and paint my own picture with my imagination.

So, anyway, here's a song. Hopefully you can kind of hear what I'm talking about.

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Wagomu

Obvious lyrics aren't much of a problem for me, since they really aren't offensive enough to make an impact in my mind. Music is a group effort and great instrumentation and vocals will trump mediocre lyrics. It's like blast beats in a black metal song: not original or clever but fitting enough to keep all eyebrows unraised.

Good vocals are another part of the equation as well. My taste, though, extends to both sides of the spectrum. Well-honed and controlled vocals can be a beautiful thing. Annie Haslam is my favorite proficient singer. She just has such a beautiful voice that manages to be entirely expressive, too:

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On the other hand, I love the hell out of poor vocalists, too. Punk yellers and folk singers just bleed such raw passion that I can't help but fall for it.

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The thing about vocals is that they can just inject so much emotion into a song because we spend so much of our lives learning to scavenge psychology from those tones. That's not to say that no other instruments can, because there's no doubt that they can and do, but vocals are a shortcut to the heart.

Sarfallet

@Wagomu:

Obvious lyrics aren't much of a problem for me, since they really aren't offensive enough to make an impact in my mind. Music is a group effort and great instrumentation and vocals will trump mediocre lyrics. It's like blast beats in a black metal song: not original or clever but fitting enough to keep all eyebrows unraised.

Dunno if it's much of a problem for me either. More often than not I find mediocre lyrics accompanies mediocre music. And it really only becomes a factor with music that I listen to more seriously, not music I just listen to in the back of my mind while doing other things.
I guess part of my problem with lyrics is that, as you pointed out, that we spend a lot of time with human speech… They are so damned easy to pick up, even in midst of utter sonic chaos.
Suckers just bugs me. :P

@Wagomu:

Good vocals are another part of the equation as well.

Most definitely! :) I love it when there's no lyrics attached:

Wagomu

I must have written this thread as another excuse to post more Mountain Goats, so I won't deny past Wagomu his kicks.

It's been a while since I've listened to Jam Eater Blues, but this song is awesome and horrifying and features some of the best lyrics the guy has ever done. There's just so much story, detail and emotion (past, present and future) crammed into just over two minutes of song without any loss of resolution.

Sarfallet

@Wagomu:

It's been a while since I've listened to Jam Eater Blues, but this song is awesome and horrifying and features some of the best lyrics the guy has ever done. There's just so much story, detail and emotion (past, present and future) crammed into just over two minutes of song without any loss of resolution.

With my abysmal English skills I only managed to deduce that the singer passes out and sees someone with a hole in the head…? And like isn't it all in the past? :V
Care to expound? :)

Wagomu

@Sarfallet:

With my abysmal English skills I only managed to deduce that the singer passes out and sees someone with a hole in the head…? And like isn't it all in the past? :V
Care to expound? :)

The lyrics

To try and explain (though my words couldn't do his justice), the story is basically as simple as you said. Some random act of violence left two friends or lovers on a supermarket floor, one with a bullet in their brain and the other knocked out. Each verse sort of encapsulates the shock, guilt and agony of the scene and leaves you with an emotional profile of the experience deeper than most authors can get in over a couple hundred pages of text.

Sarfallet

@Wagomu:

The lyrics

To try and explain (though my words couldn't do his justice), the story is basically as simple as you said. Some random act of violence left two friends or lovers on a supermarket floor, one with a bullet in their brain and the other knocked out. Each verse sort of encapsulates the shock, guilt and agony of the scene and leaves you with an emotional profile of the experience deeper than most authors can get in over a couple hundred pages of text.

Good to know I wasn't completely of course. :) I understand where you get that they are friends from, narrator seems too affected for the one with the hole in the head to be just some random person. And a hole in the head you would usually interpret as a bullet hole. But what makes you think that he got the bullet at the supermarket? :S

Anyways, I'm tired of hearing all about The Mountain Goats all the time all over the forum… And not knowing what the fuss is about. :P Is there some natural starting place? Some album or live videos or just pick random songs from a hat?

Sakonosolo

Listen to The Sunset Tree. That's my favorite of their albums. The Life of the World to Come is really good too.

Wagomu

@Sarfallet:

Good to know I wasn't completely of course. :) I understand where you get that they are friends from, narrator seems too affected for the one with the hole in the head to be just some random person. And a hole in the head you would usually interpret as a bullet hole. But what makes you think that he got the bullet at the supermarket? :S

Second line says it specifically, haha.

Anyways, I'm tired of hearing all about The Mountain Goats all the time all over the forum… And not knowing what the fuss is about. :P Is there some natural starting place? Some album or live videos or just pick random songs from a hat?

The Mountain Goats have two eras of music. Up until Tallahassee, everything is very lo-fi singer/songwriter folk oriented. Tallahassee and beyond is more hi-fi indi-influenced fare. It's all really good by my reckoning. For the lo-fi stuff, check out All Hail West Texas. For the hi-fi, I say start with Tallahassee.

Sarfallet

@Wagomu:

Second line says it specifically, haha.

Hm… I thought that the narrator passed out in the supermarket, for some reason, and just had this vision of a dead friend/lover.

@Wagomu:

The Mountain Goats have two eras of music. Up until Tallahassee, everything is very lo-fi singer/songwriter folk oriented. Tallahassee and beyond is more hi-fi indi-influenced fare. It's all really good by my reckoning. For the lo-fi stuff, check out All Hail West Texas. For the hi-fi, I say start with Tallahassee.

Aight, I'll check out the albums you and Sakonosolo mentioned. Thanks, both of you! :)