Pressing skin to steel strings and wood, they make the city night wail with the music of the bluesman and his Manhattan blues band.
But Stephens sounded even quieter in Hisense Arena on Monday when she played the Serbian 21-year-old Bojana Jovanovski, whose two-toned wail with every streak reverberated through the big, airy arena.
JON PARELES TITUS ANDRONICUS/REAL ESTATE The five members of Titus Andronicus aren't teenagers, exactly, but they lash and wail with adolescent aplomb, churning out fiery screeds about the Civil War, getting drunk and living in New Jersey.
The death of a loved one, the breakup of a romance or a crisis of self-doubt all send Amy Lee's voice aloft, to wail with unbridled drama while her band thrashes and roars.
The most destabilizing scene in "The Host" comes as Gang-du and the others wail with grief before a photograph of Hyun-seo, whom they believe to be dead, and make such a spectacle of themselves, writhing like eels, that despite ourselves we snicker at their collapse.
Garrett is the only person I've known in real life who has what I call "Alex Jones voice", a sound somewhere between a bleat and a wail with a foot-high slurry of gravel underneath.
She sang "Fallin'" with such fervor the audience answered her every wail with cheers.
Nick Catucci of the same publication gave the song three stars writing, "Amy Lee trades anguish for defiance, goosing her wail with welcome sass.
Rounding out the final A-Sides trifecta of 2012 are Hunter Valentine, a metal-inspired all-female rock act that can wail with the best of them.
If you have never seen a man the size of a linebacker wail with guilt and drunkenness and dread at being a sinner in the hands of an angry God, let me tell you: It's no fun at all.
