Nine bands submitted demos, but only five were chosen for the 2011 Battle of the Bands at Warsaw Community High School.
The Battle takes place March 31 at 7 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center.
According to WCHS band director and Battle of the Bands organizer Mickey Ratliff, two of the five bands competing this year won in previous years. Beyond the Puppet won in 2009, and Space Dragon won in 2010.
"They will be very good," Ratliff said.
The other three bands competing include Against the Sun, LCM and Jooahn Kim.
"I think it's going to be a pretty wide variety. I know they're good because I had nine bands submit demos and all of them were very good. It was hard to narrow it down to five. In past years, I only had five or six demos," said Ratliff. "I know that anyone who comes will hear five really strong performances and a variety."
As for the bands' musical styles, Ratliff said Beyond the Puppet is heavy progressive. Band members write some of their own originals and have good material, he said. The band's sound is intricate and interesting.
Space Dragon, he said, is a fun, hard rock band, and their music is catchy, too. He said it was hard to describe because they sound like 1970s progressive rock, too. Their songs are epic like Rush or Kansas.
On their demo, Ratliff said of LCM, the band did a cover of Jet's "Are You Going to be My Girl?", "You Make my Dreams Come True" by Hall & Oates and "Barracuda" by Heart.
Jooahn Kim was hard for Ratliff to describe. The group is kind of bluesy, hard edge pop rock. One song was more acoustic with voice and guitars, Ratliff said. A couple of their songs sounded like Tori Amos and Fiona Apple.
Against the Sun is a hard core band, Ratliff said. The band writes its own originals for the most part. While hard core is not Ratliff's style of music, he said, it's good and quality music.
"You can tell they put a lot of time and effort into what they are doing," he said.
Tickets for Battle of the Bands are $5 per person at the door. All proceeds benefit the Band Boosters.
Winners of the Battle are chosen by audience vote. Each ticket is a person's vote. The more people that come out to support a band, the greater the chance the band could win.
The winning band will receive $500, with $200 going to second place. Rex's Rendezvous sponsored part of the prize money.
The best instrumentalist award goes to any band member that just has an outstanding performance as determined by an independent judge. This year's judge is John Finken from local bands Moxie and CODA."I just want to encourage people to come out. For me, it's fun because I get to work with students who normally are not in the band. I put it together, but the actual evening is fun for me because I get to sit back and listen," Ratliff said.
"I was super impressed with the demos I got this year, so it should be a great night," he said.
