Results for Best Christian Metal Album of the Year..

Hi everyone,

For the past month, I've been collecting votes via Google documents via the following link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1QWQkQJYuOS2e9mxLbsVokkuumqCz4ec9QZ0mhOO7AuY/viewform?usp=send_form

I said I'd post around New Years, and with 3 days left (and maybe 3-4 votes being cast in the past few days), I think the results are solid enough to declare winners and the like.

As a refresher, all participants were allowed to vote for Album of the Year, Runner Up, and up to 3 Honorable Mentions. Scoring was as follows:

3pts for "Album of the Year"
2pts for "Runner Up Album of the Year"
1pt per "Honorable mention" 

So each voter could contribute up to 8 points for the various songs listed - of the 62 songs available for selection.

I am glad to report that the voting was extremely prolific, and we had over 150 votes in this project, which is pretty nice. The survey/document link was posted here, Reddit.com/r/Christcore, and one of the bands (which I'll mention) posted it to their Facebook page. I did not doctor or alter the results in any way, other than remove 2-3 votes that looked errant for multiple voting (same exact votes within a few seconds of each other). Given the number of total votes, I believe that there was little that was gained from the duplication, so the results are pretty strong.

Without further ado:


#1. Promise Land - Harmony in Ruins (234 Points)




Remember how I said a band posted the link to the document? Well, their fan base contributed heavily to this vote. Depending on what you want to think of the vote, it was heavily skewed by their fans, as the album had maybe 5-7pts prior to the link and voting. 


#2. Demon Hunter - Extremist (65 points)



Interestingly enough, this album didn't receive a huge number of "Album of the Year" votes. It did, however, garner a huge number of votes as runner up and honorable mention, which allowed it to get to #2 on the list. Obviously, there's a huge drop-off in terms of votes for all albums outside of #1, so you may or may not want to consider this the true #1 Album of the Year.


#3. A Hill to Die Upon - Holy Despair (52 Points)



This album tied Demon Hunter's album for 2nd most votes for Album of the Year, but had less runner-up/honorable votes. It still had enough to stand well above all the other albums, and secures the Top 3, bringing complete a death metal album in the list.


#4. Saint - Broad Is The Gate (43 Points)



In a sea of metalcore and death metal nominees, Saint was one of the few classic heavy metal-style bands to reach the top 10. Good for Mr. Lynch and the new Saint crew!


#5. For Today - Fight the Silence



Interestingly enough, almost all votes for this album came from "Honorable Mention" and only had 2 first-place votes. 


#6 through #10:


#6. Wolves at the Gate - VxV
#7. Pantokrator - Incarnate
#8. Sleeping Giant - Finished People
#9. Fit for a King - Slave to Nothing
#10. Silent Planet - The Night God Slept


Genre Specific Results (1pt per album - was added about halfway through votes tallied):

Best Heavy, Power, or Thrash Metal Album of the Year: Saint - Broad is the Gate
Best Metalcore Album of the Year: War of Ages - Supreme Chaos
Best Black, Death, Doom or Progressive Death Album of the Year: Pantokrator - Incarnate
Best Hard Rock Album of the Year: Seventh Day Slumber - We Are The Broken
Best Progressive or Symphonic Metal Album of the Year - Promise Land - Harmony in Ruins


Vote values for all albums:

 

1	Promise Land - Harmony In Ruins (Progressive Metal)	234
2	Demon Hunter - Extremist (Heavy Metal)	65
3	A Hill to Die Upon - Holy Despair (Black/Death Metal)	52
4	Saint - Broad Is The Gate (Heavy Metal)	43
5	For Today - Fight The Silence (Metalcore)	38
6	Wolves at the Gate - VxV (Metalcore)	38
7	Pantokrator - Incarnate (Progressive/Death Metal)	31
8	Sleeping Giant - Finished People (Metalcore)	28
9	Fit For a King - Slave to Nothing (Metalcore)	28
10	Silent Planet - The Night God Slept (Metalcore)	25
11	GX Project - Sinner (Hard Rock)	24
12	The Tourniquet Ark (Ted Kirkpatrick) - Onward to Freedom (Thrash Metal)	23
13	Harmony - Theatre Of Redemption (Symphonic Metal)	21
14	Disciple - Attack (Heavy Metal/Metalcore)	21
15	Teramaze - Estoteric Symbolism (Progressive Metal)	21
16	Letter 7 - Trust (Heavy Metal)	20
17	Michael Sweet - I'm Not Your Suicide (Heavy Metal)	20
18	Pylon - Homo Homini Lubus (Black/Doom Metal)	19
19	Veni Domine - Light (Black/Doom Metal)	19
20	Gideon - Calloused (Metalcore)	18
21	Northern Flame - Glimpse of Hope (Power Metal)	17
22	Solamors - Depravity's Demise (Technical Death Metal)	13
23	Hilastherion - Signs Of The End (Death Metal)	12
24	Empire 21 - Empire 21 (Progressive Metal)	12
25	Project 86 - Knives to the Future (Hard Rock)	11
26	Barren Cross - Birth Pangs (Heavy Metal)	11
27	The Autumn League - Concept Of Irony (Death Metal)	11
28	War of Ages - Supreme Chaos (Metalcore)	10
29	Flyleaf - Between The Stars (Hard Rock)	10
30	Seventh Day Slumber - We Are The Broken (Hard Rock)	9
31	Guardian - Almost Home (Hard Rock)	9
32	Blood Thirsty - Sanguine River Absolution (Heavy Metal)	8
33	Saving Grace - The Urgency (Metalcore)	7
34	Austrian Death Machine - Triple Brutal (Metalcore)	7
35	Signum Regis - Exodus (Thrash Metal)	6
36	Halcyon Way - Conquer (Heavy Metal)	5
37	Liberty 'N' Justice - The Vow (Heavy Metal)	4
38	The Overseer - Rest and Let Go (Metalcore)	4
39	True Strength - The Cross Will Always Prevail (Power Metal)	4
40	Colossus - Badlands (Metalcore)	4
41	Taker - It Is Finished	4
42	The Brave - Rise	4
43	Sinbreed - Shadows (Thrash Metal)	4
44	Mouth of the South - Struggle Well (Metalcore)	4
45	Forevermore - Telos (Metalcore)	3
46	Those Who Fear - Death Sentence (Metalcore)	3
47	Mike Florio - Reconcile (Hard Rock)	3
48	Mission Of One - Hostile To The Gospel (Heavy Metal)	3
49	Dodsmarsch - Skandinavian Black Metal Alliance (Black Metal)	3
50	Relentless Flood - The Time Is Now (Hard Rock)	3
51	Thy Bleeding Skies: Seconds Of Immortality (Death Metal)	2
52	Zero+onE - III (Black/Death Metal)	2
53	Dalit - Descent (Black/Death Metal)	2
54	End Of September - End Of September (Hard Rock)	2
55	Sign Of Jonah - Sacrifice (Hard Rock)	1
56	Derek Close - The Beta Sessions (Hard Rock)	1
57	Atkins May Project - Empire Of Destruction (Heavy Metal)	1
58	Messenger - Perfect Strom (Heavy Metal)	1
59	Jupiter VI - Movable Walls (Heavy Metal)	1
60	Sardis - Escape (Heavy Metal)	1
NR	Razorigami - Truths From Beyond This Machine (Heavy Metal)	0
NR	HypnoGog - Syndrig Tymes (Doom/Stoner Metal)	0

Thanks for voting!

That is sad to see only one classic metal release in the top 5.

I definitely need to check out that Promise Land album.  I really like their sound, not to mention the theme of that song.

Glad to see For Today's Fight the Silence placed highly.  I'm not big on metalcore, but I really enjoy that album.

That list looks pretty good for what some consider to be a "down year" for new music.

To note, a huge number of voters came from Reddit (probably 60%) so votes are going to be skewed towards more modern metal. Additionally, there were fewer releases this year, so if you're into that form of music... You had 10-12 albums to choose from, whereas if you like old school heavy metal, you had maybe 18-20 to choose from. 

Overall, most of the albums were pretty darn good. I was a big fan of War of Ages, Teramaze, Saint, Fit For a King, and Letter 7.. Good mix of old and new for me.

Thank you to whoever gave me the honorable mention!

Interesting results.  Lots more metalcore than I expected so high on the list.  I'd be interested to see how this list would look if we voted a year from now.  For instance, I JUST got Promise Land and Saint and haven't actually listened to them yet so I didn't vote for them.  I don't have Harmony yet so no vote from me there either.

SpaceGuy wrote:To note, a huge number of voters came from Reddit (probably 60%) so votes are going to be skewed towards more modern metal. Additionally, there were fewer releases this year, so if you're into that form of music... You had 10-12 albums to choose from, whereas if you like old school heavy metal, you had maybe 18-20 to choose from. 

Overall, most of the albums were pretty darn good. I was a big fan of War of Ages, Teramaze, Saint, Fit For a King, and Letter 7.. Good mix of old and new for me.

What's Reddit???

Reddit.com/r/Christcore

Reddit.com is the largest internet forum in the world. There are sub-forums for literally any topic in the world - there are about 100,000 people subscribed to Christanity, and about 1,100 subscribed to Christian metal via /r/ChristCore

Got it! I will check it out. Thanks.

Be careful at Reddit dude. THere's lots of stuff there that isn't... uh... you know... Christian friendly... and sometimes it's easy to stumble onto...

Huzzah for Promise Land!!!

Good list of band of the top 10!! Promise Land is #1 I agree with that one!

What has happened?! When this place does a Top 10 and I don't even recognize the majority of the bands on the list, we've strayed far from where we started. Wow.

The only new release I bought was...Veni Domine - Light.
I just got it last week. So I haven't decided if I like it yet.

Whoever is responsible for this did an awesome job! We used some of it as part of our rankings for our show! Next year maybe we can colaborate further on this! But here's the podcast if anyone is interested! http://www.roxxproductions.com/roxxcast

Follower of Jesus wrote:What has happened?! When this place does a Top 10 and I don't even recognize the majority of the bands on the list, we've strayed far from where we started. Wow.

that's how all music is. Do you want Stryper to just keep putting out Soldiers Under Command over and over?

It wasn't a criticism. But when the CMR began (2002), this list would have been dominated by classic and thrash metal. That it is now dominated by metalcore and the like just indicates a big change here.

Follower of Jesus wrote:It wasn't a criticism. But when the CMR began (2002), this list would have been dominated by classic and thrash metal. That it is now dominated by metalcore and the like just indicates a big change here.

I think there is a lot more bands now than in 2002 so there is a lot more choice.  Not a big Metalcore  fan myself but love War Of Ages and they would be in my top 10 for 2014.  Love their music and great lyrics.  Don't know if you have the 'Messenger ~ Perfect Storm' and 'Letter 7 ~ Trust' releases but they are outstanding and would be in my top 10 for 2014 without a shadow of a doubt!!!

Follower of Jesus wrote:What has happened?! When this place does a Top 10 and I don't even recognize the majority of the bands on the list, we've strayed far from where we started. Wow.

Since I have the hard copies of every single vote, and how they voted, I can answer this:

You have 4 groups of people that voted in this:

1. People that voted for Promised Land because it was shared on Facebook. They voted for that album, and maybe a few of their votes (25% maybe) were for other bands - and that was evenly split between "Classic" metal bands and modern stuff like Demon Hunter.

2. People that voted for metal core / modern heavy metal. These were respondents from reddit.com/r/Christcore - I had a pretty high number of respondents there, probably more than CMR. Additionally, there were a lot less albums listed that they voted for. 

3. People that voted for classic heavy metal / CMR-type albums like Saint, Tourniquet, and so on. This was probably about 75% of CMR respondents. Additionally, this was the most wide, and far-reaching number of albums, since there were something like 20 classic heavy metal albums, along with other CMR-type bands that were hard rock, or prog metal (like Promised Land, Harmony, ect).

4. People that voted for death/doom metal. These were likely CMR respondents too. They only voted for doom/black/death metal.. So their lists were esentially a mixture of maybe.. 5 albums, kind of like the Metalcore respondents.

So the sum of the answer is that there were more classic heavy metal albums fighting over fewer votes. The metalcore voters rallied behind 5 or 6 albums, whereas the CMR-type favorites like Saint had to fight against 15-17 other albums, which prevented them from listing higher. There were a LOT of albums that got 5-15 votes that were CMR-type albums, and those were mostly votes for "Honorable mentions" which were more likely to be given out, since any user could vote for 1 album worth 3 points, but 3 albums worth 1 point each.

I can gladly provide the source data for votes, but its a bit messy. I somewhat expected the votes to go the way they did in regards to the fact that metalcore bands are more popular, and there are more people that likely have heard albums from that group as opposed to the CMR group.

The reason behind posting the listings to the other forum was for Christian metal evangelism. The comments I got from the metalcore respondents usually involved "I had no idea Tourniquet/Saint/ect had a new album out!" because they knew of the bands, but did not know them well enough to listen to their music prior to voting. So there are now more people aware of CMR-type bands than there were... Which was part of why I did this.. To give Christian metal listeners an idea of how much metal is really out there to listen to.

In summary, here are the number of albums for each genre - and users typically voted only for albums within each genre:

Heavy Metal / Thrash (CMR-type albums): 19
Metalcore (Reddit/modern albums): 15
Black/Death Albums: 12
Hard Rock Albums: 9 (mix of CMR/Modern)
Progressive Metal (CMR-type albums): 4

So CMR voters had approximately 27-29 albums to choose from, where metalcore voters had, at most, 20. Then you had blackmetal fans that had even less at 12.

Bill Roxx wrote:Whoever is responsible for this did an awesome job! We used some of it as part of our rankings for our show! Next year maybe we can colaborate further on this! But here's the podcast if anyone is interested! http://www.roxxproductions.com/roxxcast

Very cool, listening now!

SpaceGuy - as I said, there's no criticism here. And it sounds like had the vote been limited to CMR members, it would probably would have included a great deal more classic and thrash metal. It's not a problem at all, and I like letting a broader community of metal fans know about this great music that we here all know about. You did indeed do a great job, both with the work of the poll itself and with explaining methodology after the fact. Kuddos!