Gary Lenaire vocals appreciation thread

A Tourniquet fanboy thread incoming.

Ok, Guy Ritter is the Tourniquet vocalist and one of if not the best metal vocalists in the world, and Luke is great too.
Now that this fact is dealt with, let's go...


I finally got my Tourniquet collection done by receiving The Collected Works of Tourniquet CD from mail. This album has the last two vocal performances of Gary Lenaire in Tourniquet in the two new songs "Perfect Night for a Hanging" and "The Hand Trembler", both of which I have listened to countless of times before as they are some of the all time best Tourniquet songs.

I was spinning the album and was in The Hand Trembler when I got a sudden urge to shout out Gary Lenaire's vocal skills to the world.

Here's the song on Youtube:


Just listen to the 1:56 - 2:12 part.
The vocals are split with Luke and Gary. While Luke does a great job too, it becomes clear Gary is the master when the split happens.

Luke:
A family looks on forlorn and sad
The outcome will determine faithful or mad
Temperature soars to 107
Gary:
Passing hands not yet ready for heaven
He sees himself floating somewhere overhead
A haunting apparition high above his bed

While Luke sounds good, he doesn't have this special distinctive voice that Gary has with the shouting vocals.
Luke sounds really good here in a technical way (I think this might be his best shouting vocal performance), but Gary's voice sounds like it's coming from somewhere more deep and real. It cracks and it almost breaks but it holds up and that's one of the things that makes him sound distinctive and interesting.

Just listen closely to the part where they sing "Temperature soars to 107, passing hands not yet ready for heaven" and hear the change in between.
I can't stop rewinding that and hoping Gary was still part of Tourniquet

And damn, that final scream at 5:43 is fantastic too. You can hear it's Gary doing that.

And now this thread is a The Hand Trembler appreciation thread too!
What a fantastic song this is! It's a really cool mixture of heavy metal, thrash, punk, doom, groove and death metal (with some worship rock ballad thrown in too). It's a very unique genre-subgenre hybrid! Not only this is a hybrid but the riffs that represent those genres and subgenres are absolutely top notch too! The main thrash riff is one of my all time favorites and the riffs in the punk and the groove and the death parts are really good too. Ted's songwriting skills shine throughout the whole song. Some could say he was at his peak at this point. The musicianship is terrific, the drums, the bass, the guitars... and the SOUND is FANTASTIC too. Sounds really unique. I have seriously not heard any other song that sounds like this (other than Perfect Night for a Hanging of course). And of course there is the Marty Friedman solo in the end too.

Funny to think this song came in 1996 when metal was dying in mainstream, it was grunge and industrial and alternative rock that was the cool thing to play and listen, and Metallica, Megadeth and Anthrax were all changing (and oddly enough you can add Tourniquet too on that list, lol) and suddenly this song was a thing! Like really, Stomp 442 had been released, Load was released, Cryptic Writings was in the making, Slayer was a couple of years from Diabolus in Musica, Tourniquet had Carry the Wounded come before this and Crawl to China becoming afterwards. But there it was, The Hand Trembler. The last Tourniquet recording with Victor Macias and Gary Lenaire. Everything was changing.

Oh man what a moment in time this song is!

Gary is a great guitarist. He’s one of my favorites from the old Christian Metal days. His shouting voice is also great. He’s like Tom Araya!

End of an era really but those two songs are awesome.