NME Awards Tour 2010 - Glasgow Barrowlands

The NME has been at the forefront of new music for the last 60 years, but with new music becoming so readily available online, the magazine has kind of taken a back seat in the past decade or so. However the NME Awards Tour has always been an opportunity for NME to prove its worth in taste in new music and this year’s lineup is no different. The tour usually comprises of three of the best new artists around at the moment, and one fairly established band that NME have supported for a while.

New York quartet The Drums get the opening slot, playing tracks from both their outstanding ‘Summertime!’ E.P and their forthcoming album. They’ve been described by most people as “like Joy Division covering The Beach Boys” and this description pretty much sums them up perfectly. Their Cure-esque guitar and synth lines go strangely well with their surf tinged melodies and singer Jonathan Pierce’s Ian Curtis impression is extremely convincing – he’s even got the dance down to a tee. If he was 15 years older he’d be an embarrassing dad at a wedding, however the music makes up for it. Highlights of their set include their super catchy single ‘Let’s Go Surfing’ and the 1950s influenced ‘Don’t Be a Jerk, Johnny’, at which point they’re joined on stage by two members of Glasgow indie pop band Camera Obscura on backing vocals.

The Big Pink are up next, the band I’m least excited to see as I’ve only heard their less than average one hit wonder ‘Dominos’. In an over the top, dry ice and laser show they arrive on stage. They trudge through a six song set filled with dreary, distortion filled tracks, coming to one great anti-climax in the form of ‘Dominos’. Definitely the low point of the evening and the best is definitely yet to come.

Bombay Bicycle Club prove with their 2009 debut that they are one of the most exciting new bands in Britain right now. They won the Road to V Festival in 2006 and, after two E.Ps, their debut album ‘I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose’ received critical acclaim from all corners of the music press. As they walk on stage it feels as is if they could easily be the headline act. Opening with the leading track from their album, the instrumental ‘Emergency Contraception Blues’, they work their way through a stellar set, playing the best songs from the album and one new song. The now capacity crowd seem to know all the words to possibly the catchiest song of last year ‘Always Like This’ and they close their set with the anthemic ‘Cancel On Me’.

On release of their second album, ‘Wall of Arms’, The Maccabees turned from relatively unknown composers of fast paced yet romantic indie anthems to a genuinely heavyweight band, acquiring main stage slots at most of the major festivals last summer. They open their set with ‘William Powers’, one of the lesser known but better tracks from ‘Wall of Arms’. The three layered guitars and chanting vocals make for an extremely impressive opener. It’d be extremely hard to play every great song from both their albums… because there really is no filler in either of them. ‘X-Ray’ has probably the catchiest guitar line since most of Arctic Monkeys’ debut album; ‘Precious Time’ is one great big singalong and ‘No Kind Words’ is an eerie track, climaxing with yet another amazing guitar riff. A questionable cover of the 1983 Orange Juice hit ‘Rip It Up’ is really the only low-ish point in the set but they make up for it by playing a one song encore and highlight of the amazing second album, ‘Love You Better’. Definitely one of the best live sets I’ve seen in a long time, and with outstanding support (minus The Big Pink) this was definitely a night to remember.