The NME Awards Tour 2010 (Leeds)
Given the NME's long-held liking for and endorsement of white male guitar bands, it's hardly surprising to find that the bill for this tour is made up of four white male indie guitar bands, in the form of The Drums, The Big Pink, Bombay Bicycle Club and The Maccabees.
Previous tours have introduced the talents of artists like Florence And The Machine and as the evening progresses (and a three and a half hour show will test the patience of even the most dedicated Grateful Dead fan) this lack of variety starts to wear a little thin, which is a shame because in isolation all of these bands have something to recommend them.
New York geek-surf-pop band The Drums open the show with a solid set that suffers a little from the relative unfamiliarity of the songs but the skittish energy of the band, dressed like fifties ivy league students, wins over the crowd. The Big Pink, whose recent debut album 'A Brief History Of Love' has been well-received, follow but unfortunately live the band are unable to reproduce the lysergic swagger of their recorded material. Instead their brand of electro-rock loses all of its dynamics under a sludgy wall of echo-laden sound. Even when they close their set with 'Dominoes', their most high profile song, they fail to rouse the kind of communal rapture in the crowd they seem desperate to elicit and really there is only so long you can watch a grown man enthusiastically twiddling knobs on a table-full of effects peddles before you begin to question the purpose of humanity.
Fortunately Bombay Bicycle Club offer a much needed tonic with a set full of ambitious, intricate off-kilter, slightly eccentric indie rock and, whilst they suffer from the modern disease of smoothing out the rough edges of their recorded material so that live they sound like a stadium rock band, the intuitive and intricate interplay of the band mark them out as real contenders, as does the fact that they are the only band brave enough to try out new material in what is essentially a showcase environment.
Headliners The Maccabees, a band who you couldn't really consider as new talent given that they are onto their second album, arrive on stage augmented by a sixth member and a three piece brass section. A remarkably tight and accomplished live unit, they run through the bulk of 'Wall Of Arms' without ever reaching the transcendent heights of Arcade Fire, a band they are clearly owe a debt. Sadly only an impassioned, chaotic rendition of ‘No Kind Words’ manages to really ignite the crowd, who give the impression of being a little short changed by the lack of charisma on show here.
What these bands lack is the ability to communicate with their audience - there is a noticeable lack of any between song dialogue - and it is this ability that elevates the great live bands above the merely competent. So whilst these showcase tours are always a little artificial, the powers that be might need to consider injecting something a little more leftfield into next year's bill, as this was all a little too homogenised, polite and mannered to really satisfy despite the odd moment of genuine class.
O2 Academy, Leeds, Sunday 7th February 2010.
Written by Sam Monk.
