6. Aquarious — Love the epic, but boy am I happy they decided to drop the death growls after this record.
This, my god, this. I don’t mind death growls, but Ross’s attempts at them were just laughable and totally out of place.
This baffles me. Because I never even viewed them as “death growls”. It’s a concept album and I always thought that it was the mermaids father speaking and that he was supposed to sound that way because he was like a “merman beast” like thing. So it’s like I’m watching a Disney movie and this repulsive swamp creature crawls into the scene with seaweed dripping off his body, and when he goes to speak his dialogue, that’s just what he sounds like.
Which in turn, makes it sound totally IN place.
In the album’s defense, the quote attributed to me was from my initial post (where I also ranked the album dead last in their catalog). I’ve since come to love and appreciate the album, even the 15 or so seconds of growling.
I was listening to
Affinity the other day and forgot about the vocals at 10:46 of "The Architect" and wondered if there's been one short portion on each album where the band tries some unique vocals? Obviously on
Fauna there's the "screaming Mickey through a megaphone" vocals of "Beneath The White Rainbow", and the death growls on Aquarius. I need to go back and listen to their other albums and see if there are others that I'm just not remembering at the moment.
Do these vocal "experiments" bother many folks, even if they're very short and only appear briefly on their respective albums? At this point in my relationship with
Fauna, I've come to tolerate BTWR's high-screaming vocal verses, and that part in the middle of "The Architect" never really bothered me, same with the growls on Aquarius.
EDIT - Also, unrelated to the topic of varying vocals, I made this collage of all the artwork used for Haken's albums and singles, and Roine Stolt (Pale Rider on Facebook) commented saying "Aquarium still their best ...." I mean, it's good, and I could see why The Flower King would like it most, but I still feel like Haken have improved bit by bit with each record, and I like that they aren't repeating themselves (too much). I also love how their artwork has evolved and changed over time. I do miss the logo they used between Affinity-Vector-Virus though. Hopefully the new font for their logo sticks around for a couple more albums, it looks pretty good IMO.
-Marc.