Nothing says "metal" like good old-fashioned demographic analysis, and one writer over at Noisey has ranked American cities by how metal they are. This study was inspired by a recent map of Europe that made the internet rounds, ranking each nation by how many metal bands it had, per capita. (Finland, naturally, crushed it.)

Applying data culled from metal website Encyclopaedia Metallum, Simon Davis has determined the top 100 cities for metal in the United States. And Portland? It's number two. We come in with a score of 618, being beaten only by Cleveland, Ohio—a city that has just enjoyed another kind of victory—which comes in at a score of 837. (Not entirely sure what those numeric values mean. I think the number is how many metal bands a city has per one million residents, but this is not totally clear in reading Davis' report.)

HOWEVER. There is a very big however, and Davis acknowledges this in his findings. According to Encyclopaedia Metallum, a majority of Cleveland's metal bands are inactive. There was a prolific and thriving death-metal scene in that city in the 1990s, but many of those bands are defunct and long gone. Portland has a much higher rate of active metal bands—67 percent, as opposed to Cleveland's 38 percent. Using those figures, a much more accurate score can be determined: Portland has an score of 414, compared with Cleveland's puny 318. Add to this statistic the additional fact that Oregon has the highest concentration of metal bands on a state-by-state basis in the country (according, again, to Encyclopaedia Metallum), and it becomes apparent that Portland is the clear victor.

Sorry, Cleveland. While all sane-thinking people hope you win on Sunday, you clearly did not win this particular matchup. Check out Noisey's fuzzy metal math, and see the list of the top 100 metal cities in the US, by going here.