Who Likes Those High Notes?

Squealing. Squeaking. High-pitched. The majestic falsetto. It seems as though the 80's left most of the great high notes stuck in the era. Maybe as time went on, people stopped appreciating loud, extremely high-pitched notes being blasted through their speakers; but personally, I can't get enough of it.

What ever happened to the great false-setto singers? There are not a lot of them to be spread around these days. And the people who actually can get way up into the sky of musical notes, aren't usually heard very often. However, there are some very noteworthy singers that can really reach up with their vocal cords. The first that comes to mind is only really known for one song that hit radios everywhere maybe five or six years ago. The band is called The Darkness. The song: I Believe In A Thing Called Love. Singer Justin Hawkins and friends are very reminiscent of an 80's hair metal band; except they are English. Go figure. The rest of the band's album, Permission To Land, is chalk full of insanely high vocals, courtesy of Hawkis. Maybe it is his slightly exagerated "v-body suits" that help him get that extra height on his notes.

Another vocalist who has one insane amount of range is Matthew Bellamy of Muse. The band's newest album, The Resistance, doesn't have quite the wide vocal range of some previous albums, but Bellamy's voice still sticks out like a sore thumb. "Supermassive Black Hole" is a song that really showcases the power of the false-setto. Almost the entire song is sung in an abnormally high pitch, and yet it never get's annoying or painful to the ears. Matthew Bellamy has made the high-note look good again.

Muse is one of the few bands that can be said is known by the majority of people. But honestly, there aren't very many other bands that have a singer who regularly reaches up into space to grab notes down from the moon, that are heard on a regular basis nowadays. Andrew Stockdale from Wolfmother can hit his fair share of high-notes, as well as Claudio Sanchez from Coheed and Cambria. Both of these bands definetly have their fair share of a large number of followers, but we just don't hear them everyday. It's a shame to put such a great vocal talent in the "annoying" category. It's just too awesome to go un-noticed.

Still to this day, people love and crave hearing "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey. Steve Perry had a high voice. Period. But no one ever thinks his voice is annoying or ear piercing. The same goes for one of the best false-setto' voices ever, in my opinion, Freddy Mercury of Queen. Most everyone can sing along to most of "Bohemian Rhapsody," even if they don't know the words.

Maybe it's just the fact that people don't really sing like Mercury and Perry anymore. But man alive, those guys could really reach up to hit some high stinking notes, without much effort it seemed. Let's all pay tribute to the high-note and false-setto by singing a healthy "Galileo Figaro!" alongside a ear piercing "Born and raised in South Detroit!" Long live the power of the vocal cord.