Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Tickets to this thing go on sale this Thursday. Watch this space for pre-sale links.

Now let's talk about the Best Music Poll ballot for a second. For reasons that are lost to history, the one category where OTD really holds an sway in the nominations are in the metal categories. And so first of all, we'd like to apologize to Doomriders, who made the local metal album of the year (perhaps the national metal album of the year), and did not get nominated for a damn thing in this year's BMP. It would be great if we could blame this on some facelss set of judges or arbiters of good taste, but as it happens, them was us, and OTD just plain forgot. About our favorite metal record of the year. For the entire two hours it took to eat pizza and come up with the BMP list. Oops.

There's nothing we can do about it now, the ballot having been locked, loaded, set in stone, and stocked with audio clips, photos, links, and other sorts of thing you usually can only find only at OTD.

So for everyone who ever glanced at the ballot and went, "What the hell happened to my favorite ______ band," well, we feel your pain. We're also taking the only recourse available to anyone in such a situation. We're launching a write-in campaign for Doomriders.

It's the least we can do.

That said, the rest of the ballot -- which is to say, the parts OTD didn't flake out on -- are pretty rad. For the first time this year, you can listen to audio clips of (almost) every artist in the poll, which means even if you didn't have an opinion on the world music category before you came, you may have one by the time you leave. We've also linked the local artists to their profiles at phoenixbandguide.com, where in many cases you can download OTD-worthy exclusive mp3s. (In fact, we're gonna steal some shit from over there and pass it off as our own later this week.)

Vote or die, bitches.

DOWNLOAD: Doomriders, "Black Thunder" (mp3)
VOTE: 2006 Best Music Poll