My mental gears started turning last night. I was neglecting normal responsibilities in favor of looking over year-end lists and finding new music I may have missed. I started thinking about the many other sites across music that have cumulative lists for their albums of the year. Each writer contributes their picks to a collective pool and based on varying methods, the site concludes what their album of the year is. This is where a lot of variabilities emerge in results.
Heavy Blog is Heavy had recently published the method to their madness, along with other options. I had tried a point multiplier system that rewards more weight to writers who contributed more for Bearded Gentlemen Music. Yet, it seemed like these methods, as solid as they may sound, seemed flawed in a way. The search began for a method that kept all writers on a level playing field and avoided skewed point values based on the number of albums in a writer's individual list.
The method for determining what Metal Injection's overall album was actually pretty simple. The goal was to determine a way to compile all of the individual writers and contributors' lists, sift through all of the albums, and find the ones that showed up the most and finished the highest average position on those lists.
The first step was an initial, gross assessment of every writer's list. 18 writers turned in year-end lists that varied in size and content. Lists ranged from 10 to 25 picks and featured dozens of different albums. I cross-referenced every list for common albums and determined which albums appeared most frequently. Naturally, there were ties between albums. This created "tiers" of albums that immediately capped how high or low an album could finish on a list. Step two was an effort to break ties between albums within these tiers. I took the average position of each album within each of the tiers determined from step one and ultimately discovered Metal Injection's collective album of 2016. The results are featured below.
Personally, I think the list showcases Metal Injection's writer's diverse tastes and highlights all of the different music the site has covered this past year.
20. Trap Them – Crown Feral
19. Testament – Brotherhood of the Snake
18. Opeth – Sorceress
17. Katatonia – The Fall of Hearts
16. Fallujah – Dreamless
15. Devin Townsend Project – Transcendence
14. Sumac – What One Becomes
13. Gatecreeper – Sonoran Depravation
12. Gojira – Magma
11. Nails – You Will Never Be One Of Us
10. Metallica – Hardwired… to Self-Destruct
9. Killswitch Engage – Incarnate
8. Cult of Luna & Julie Christmas – Mariner
7. Blood Incantation – Starspawn
6. Aborted – Retrogore
5. The Dillinger Escape Plan – Dissociation
4. Vektor – Terminal Redux
3. Wormrot – Voices
2. Meshuggah – The Violent Sleep of Reason
1. Khemmis – Hunted
Wondering how some of these bands did so well? Check out our individual lists to learn more about our favorites of 2016. Happy New Year!
