Hello Heathens,

This week I wanted to make a playlist that highlighted some of my favorite male vocalists in metal, and I realized that when I listen to metal I don’t really put a lot of stress on how the lead singer sounds if the singer is a guy. Maybe part of it is that so many metal bands follow a genre formula and so all the singers sound roughly the same in a subgenre, or maybe that what highlights male leads is more of how the band surrounding the lead singer sounds. I find that women singers tend to have more distinct voices than men in the metal scene, but maybe part of that is that there are so many more men in the scene than women so we recognize the few women in the genre easier than their male counterparts.

Of all the bands on today’s playlist I think the singers I like the most fall into prog and power bands. There are some gruff vocalists that really stick out in the crowd like Ihsahn and Dani Filth. This isn’t to say the other singers are bad, but that their singing is less a thing to be put forward and more a holistic part of the sonic soundscape of the band than these other singers if that makes sense. While I was putting together the playlist another thing jumped out at me is how very few of the singers on the playlist are multi-dimensional singers. There are some singers like Roy Khan who seem like they have a wide range of skills, but most are pretty narrow in how they sing. I’ll have to think this over more with Harry and Larry as this post feels more like a ramble than anything coherent at this point.

Last thing I wanted to touch on this week was how many people give up after a failure. I got into weightlifting on a bit of a whim when I decided I wanted to try to take my health a bit more seriously. While I still need to lose weight, I’ve packed on a lot of muscle since I started and I’ve enjoyed how weightlifting reinforces the idea we all have about getting better at something. All of us know that getting better at any skill takes a long time and consistent effort, but very few things have that direct look at a graph of how much stronger you’ve gotten than weightlifting. Something else that I really enjoy about weightlifting is how failures are one of the best chances to look at what happened. The older we get the fewer things we have that we can fail at and not have any real consequences so I’ll take them where I can get them. Recently I failed a new max attempt for reps at overhead press and instead of being upset that I failed a weight that I ought to be able to do I used it as a chance to review my technique, rest, and read about what I should be expecting for my first plateau.

Keep heavy the Sabbath Day 6.29.21 Playlist