One of the great things about going to a show like the Battle of Birdy’s finals, held last Saturday, is that after six months of trials and more than a hundred bands competing, you’re pretty well guaranteed to get a hellacious dose of entertainment all night long, no matter what your musical tastes. Anyone who’s made it this far in the musical crucible knows what it takes to put on a show.

The evening started out with the melodic old-school rock of Win With Willard, and continued on into Beta Male, an experimental group whose music is in the vein of Blondie and the Triffids: heavy bass, heavy keyboard, completely wacked-out and sung by crackheads, which I say in the best manner possible.

Up next was instrumental guitar storyteller Jacob Myrian. His act’s not really the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a BoB finals, which tells you all you need to know right there. Anything this experimental that made it this far is damned impressive: great sprawling epic guitar instrumentals, the sort of thing you’d expect from low-budget sci-fi films before synthesizers came along. I could easily envision the film Heavy Metal soundtracked to this stuff.

Mardelay delivered hard-rockin’ alternative sounds — think the Psychedelic Furs or Love Spit Love with a whole lot more guitars blaring away. And the evening’s final band, Thrive, was pure nü-metal, roaring thrash all the way, with blasting vocals and guitars that cement them as the carriers of the standard once held by Tool and Primus.

The big winners, though, were The Last Good Year, who won by a margin of several hundred points and took home both the title of BoB champions and more than $12,500 in cash and prizes. It’s definitely an audience-friendly feel, the sort of arena rock that defined several generations of concertgoers. Rock Americana, they call it, and I can see that: big slabs of sound, with a distinctive folksy-blues metal riff underneath it all, the strange cousin of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mötley Crüe.