As stated in a previous post the other day, I am conducting my own little Battle of the Bands Tournament in the spirit of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. As previously stated, this is completely subjective. It’s also incredibly geeky, I’m willing to admit. At any rate, 64 bands have been selected and mostly seeded, but I’ve decided to have a play-in round of bubble bands vying for the 16th spot in the Hard Rock & Metal genre to face the #1 seed of that ‘region’. I predict a few upsets in that preliminary round.
An explanation of how I decided to do the seeding, tiebreakers and matchups. The criteria are as follows:
· “Wins” – the number of albums by each band that I hold in high regard. Naturally, it’s unlikely for any band with several releases to have their entire catalogue included in that total. For instance, one #1 seed of the tournament is Metallica with 9 wins/albums. They actually have 11 album releases of original recordings, but only 9 of those do I hold in high regard (which translates into countless hours of play and a strong influence on my life as a musician and fanatic of music).
· “Tiebreakers” – for when bands have an even number of “wins” (and there are several), I have used the bands seniority as the tiebreaker. Meaning I have gone with the year of formation, including the embryonic stage when bands may have had a different name or even a largely different lineup. However, different scenarios can arise, such as: Megadeth and Testament both have 6 wins. Both were formed in 1983. However, Megadeth released their first album in 1985, while Testament did not release their debut album until 1987.
· Matchups – I used the same method as the bracket you’d use for the college basketball tourney. After the “play-in” round, there will be the first round of 64 (16 in each genre) where the seeded bands will go against others in their genre/region. Example: #1 seeds will compete against #16; #2 versus #15; #3 versus #14 and so on and so forth.
The genres, or four “regions” are as follows:
Extreme Metal
Hard Rock & Metal
Indie Rock & Post-Punk
General & Alt-Rock *
* I’ve always rebelled against the term “alternative”, but instead of arguing with it here I’m going to use it as a catch-all term to distinguish from traditional rock, classic rock and stuff that defies one categorical music label.
Disclaimers:
– Bands that had their heyday or prime years before my time of music consciousness were not included. So with that in mind there’s no snubbing of classic greats like Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath. I am largely dealing bands that came to prominence in the 1980s or 1990s, with a couple of exceptions.
– Regretably, I had to ixnay New Wave & Electronic as a genre/region due to not having a full roster of 16 bands in to field it.
Next up: Selection Sunday with the seeding reveal.
Lost Signal 