UVic Battle of the Bands heats up
Sunhawk photo by Luke Holland.
A Monday-evening visit to UVic’s Student Union Building (SUB) certainly won’t be the hushed, library-like atmosphere one might expect.
In fact, any students hunkering down to a study session in the SUB will probably end up trading ambience for revelry.
That’s because they’ll hear loud rock music pulsating through the SUB halls, created by some of Victoria’s most promising young talent. These folks are competing in the annual Battle of the Bands contest held at UVic’s campus pub, Felicita’s.
“The bands bring the crowds out,” says Andrei Shersty, Felicita’s bar manager and organizer of Battle of the Bands. “The exposure is really, really good.”
During UVic’s spring term, Felicita’s holds the Monday-night competition where up-and-coming rock bands and artists have a chance to showcase their talent to a live audience.
The contest runs from mid-January to late March and is open to anyone interested, provided there’s at least one UVic student in the band.
The competition was organized into four qualifying rounds through January and February. Three bands competed on the qualifying nights and were given 30 minutes to rouse the crowd and impress the judges.
Ballots cast by audience members determined which bands moved on to the semifinals, which begin March 8. The band that emerges victorious wins cash prizes.
But the Battle of the Bands is in need of some tuning if it’s going to be fair for all competitors. The dilemma is audience members are casting their votes and leaving before the final band of the evening even hits the stage. Shersty wishes the whole audience would wait until the final band was finished their set before casting votes.
Another question also evoked by the audience-voting system is whether Battle of the Bands is a popularity contest.
“Do I want to enter a competition that’s based solely on popularity versus actual musical talent?” says Shersty. “Sometimes you see great bands that just don’t have the pull.”
But not all is lost. A wild-card scheme has been developed to counteract any flaws in the audience-voting system. Two bands will move on to the semifinals as wild cards. These bands either received the second-highest number of votes or are picked by a group of judges based on musical talent.
“It was an emotional rollercoaster making it to the second round,” says UVic student Ben Robertson, whose band Sunhawk was chosen as one of the wildcards.
Sunhawk played on Feb. 8 to a boisterous crowd who demanded an encore. Even still, the band did not receive enough audience votes.
“We left the show feeling we had rocked the crowd, only to find out the next day Sunhawk hadn’t moved on,” says Robertson. “Needless to say, we were pretty stoked when we found out later we were wild-carded.”
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