15 Best Hard Rock Singers Of All Time

As the hair metal scene was reaching the end of its course, the one trope people still couldn't get over was the high-pitched singer. With each passing day, another frontman with platform shoes and spandex would step up to the mic trying to make any glass in his/her general vicinity shatter. While change started to come from the rainy city of Seattle, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder put a definitive end to the dog-whistle vocals.

In a sharp contrast to the old guard, Vedder's vocals were much more gutteral, with a low timbre that made every word feel important. Though songs like "Even Flow" or "Alive" weren't necessarily reaching for the tops of Vedder's vocal range, the effectiveness of his lower register moved you in a way that few other vocalists could. Even when the band scaled things back on songs like "Daughter," the raw emotion in Vedder's throat was still too much to resist.

This marked a sea change in the way vocals were approached in rock going forward, for better and for worse. Whereas Vedder had plenty of vocal admirers, the singing voice known as the "yarl" led to some of the more insufferable vocalists in recent memory like Scott Stapp and Chad Kroeger. While it had its fair share of consequences, Eddie Vedder is the prime example of how to use that gravelly tone to move something in the audience's soul.