This thread sent me out listening to some of these bands. Whoever this guy in Greta Van Fleet is, he sounds like he adopted the worst parts of Robert Plant and Jack White (who didn’t get mentioned in here?!?)
Neil Young grates on me, even though I have a few of his albums. I can stomach him on After The Goldrush, which is a good album in spite of him. Also, the guy in China Crisis. Nothing wrong with his voice, it's just a little bland and has no character. Their music needed a singer with a little more balls, certainly more character. He sounds like a ghost calling you from a phonebox.
Marillion - Steve Hogarth era...which is a shame as I really like Fish era marillion but Steve's vocals there is something I really don't like. To add to this the vocalist in Rush (name eludes me at the second) but this band is really good and I love prog but those vocals are difficult.
Joy Division I know he killed himself, so I kind of feel bad. He just sounds like Bela Lugosi as Dracula to me.
I like several songs on the LP, but the singer sounds like he has a very bad cold - Palace of Light, Bitter Seal:
Dylan was ok until he started getting all hoarse and phlegmy, now he sounds like he can't clear his throat. (The "Tom Waits syndrome" haha ) I can't listen to anything recent from him
I used to feel this way about Robert Smith... but, I eventually grew to love The Cure so much that I actually enjoyed his vocals. I was a teenager then, and I don't know if the adult version of me now would be as forgiving.
You want to like them but can't get into any of the five singers' voices? Six, if you count Ray Gillen on the Eternal Idol deluxe edition.
Black Country New Road's new album is supposed to be for the ages, so, even though I don't pay attention to new music, I gave it a shot. The vocals aren't ridiculously awful like Billy Corgan or Uli Jon Roth's, but they weren't good either, and I won't be buying the album.
Blur. If you listen to the version of 'To The End' with Francoise Hardy, it starts nicely with the orchestration, followed by this beautiful female vocal, and it's all going along nicely until this awful Albarn vocal comes in, like a drunk dustman gatecrashing the proceedings. That's the example which springs to mind because of the obvious contrast between the two voices but even as the sole vocalist Albarn sounds dreadful. And when Blur reformed a few years ago it was like he wasn't even trying to sing to his own low standards at gigs.