I also heard that he'd lost the ability to perform death vocals. But since then, I saw the Black Sessions performance (which is from April 2003), and he is certainly capable. I am not certain to what extent, though.
This is part of the reason why I asked about their recent Rockwave performance (
here).
As far as the reason for the change in vocal style...perhaps this segment of an
interview that I found will offer some insight:
'Discouraged Ones' was somewhat of a drastic change from the previous albums. What signaled the change to the clean vocals there?
Well basically we just felt that it got stagnating a little bit because we couldn't evolve really with the songwriting anymore. We wanted to challenge ourselves again and the clean vocals just open up a whole new territory for the music and the songs.
What was the initial reaction to that album?
Cruel.
Really? Even I was kind of shocked the first couple times I listened to it, but then the more I listened to it, I was totally convinced. And now I don't even listen to the early albums with the death metal vocals. It was a great change.
Yeah, I've seen the sign of the times where people have been picking up on our style, and now it's not such a strange thing anymore because we have done more albums with the new style than the opposite. People know what we are about now, but I remember just when we did change over it was harsh times. That's why we did it. We really felt strongly about what we did so it wasn't a problem really. We haven't thought about changing back or something.
What were the musical and vocal influences for that sound or was it just a natural progression?
Well personally, we've been listening to a lot of music outside of metal, so it's just a natural influence and inspiration. That got us to realize that we could open the door. We have been longtime fans of old gothic music, old shoegazer pop stuff and alternative music. There's a lot of killer bands outside of the metal community that we were all fans of, so we figured out we could use more inspiration from the albums we listen to personally.