Ayreon Spin-off Survivor — Vocal Performance — Bracket A — Round 1

[Evermind]

Ayreon Spin-off Survivor — Vocal Performance

The series of Ayreon/Arjen Lucassen Spin-off Survivors continues! Now we do the inevitable huge Survivor with the singers involved in Ayreon project—The Source is out, so we have more source material.

I suppose I ought to tell you a bit about how it's going to work, because this was a pretty tough job to figure out how exactly should I approach this—there are a lot of singers on Ayreon albums. The number is well over half the hundred (total amount of singers participating in this is 61), and I decided to drop some of the singers from the first few albums—The Final Experiment lost some singers who are not that famous, and Into the Electric Castle lost the growling duet—but I tried to include mostly everyone of any particular note, so we have Phideaux Xavier and Zaher Zorgati in the polls. I understand that they probably won't make it to the Finals, but it felt weird to not include, say, Magali Luyten, just because her part on 01011001 isn't a huge one—she does a hell of a job on that one. Also, both Universal Migrator albums made this impossible, because everyone is singing just one song (except for a few people), and would you have me not include Bruce Dickinson or Neal Morse? I suppose what I'm saying is, well, just bear with me and let's see how it works out.

The whole thing is divided into four brackets, each one with 15 singers (the bracket D will have 16 singers). Four surviving positions advance to the final bracket. The brackets were done this way: I split the singers into five groups by my own judging: very prominent and (mostly) fan-favourite singers; prominent and famous singers; prominent and not exactly famous singers; non-prominent and famous singers; non-prominent and not exactly famous singers. Each bracket has people from each group in mostly even amounts. When all the groups were created, I then proceeded to roll some dice for which singer gets in which bracket, so there is an element of randomness there, especially if you take into account that Arjen Lucassen was in one group with Tommy Karevik, and then there's Bruce Dickinson in the non-prominent group, sharing it with not-that-well-known-but-still-pretty-well-known people like Barry Hay and Johan Edlund. Therefore, some brackets are stronger and some are weaker, but there was no objective way to do this anyway, hence some random employed in making this work. Once again, we'll just have to see how it goes, but since I chose to do it in a random way, I didn't re-balance any of the brackets afterwards.

So, short version for those who doesn't care for my ramblings: four brackets, 15-16 singers in each, four singers from each bracket advance to the Finals, vote based on their performance on Ayreon albums only (not Arjen's side-projects and not their main bands), the brackets compiled half intentionally, half randomly, rounds are two days each, all brackets will be run at the same time. Since this sub-forum is lacking some activity after DT survivor has finished, I figure it's time to boost the number of our threads a bit.

Shall we begin then?

Eliminated:

1.
2.
3.
4. 
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.


Remember, vote for your least favourite Ayreon vocal performance by one of these singers. Do not take into account singers' other efforts, like their main bands (DT for JLB, for example) or Arjen's side projects (Star One for Damian Wilson doesn't count). Most importantly, have fun!

The deadline for this round is 48 hours.

[Evermind]

If you don't know what some of the singers' vocal parts are, you can Google it, try to find it in the Arjen Discography Thread, or just ask here.

I'm going with Jacqueline Govaert for the first round. She might be a good singer, but the material she was handed wasn't the best, and so is her performance for me.

[Kwyjibo]

J. Govaert it is

[jingle.boy]

Mills.  I really don't like his contributions... they just don't fit (imo).  I recognize he's a talented vocalist, but I just don't get it.

[Kwyjibo]

  at the Mills vote. He's up there with the very best.

[Evermind]

I'm split about Mills. I loved his performance on TTOE, but I felt it was a bit lacking on The Source. I'm only three listens in though, so this could change.

Surprised not to see more people voting, since most of the singers here are pretty well-known and come from post-ITEC era, I thought we would have about ten voters total.

[MirrorMask]

Well, I wanted to try and remember who some of these singers are. I guess I'll join along against miss Jacqueline.

[Evermind]

I'll include mentions about the less well-known singers for the upcoming brackets.