NME Awards Tour

Along with the BBC's Sound of the Year poll, the annual NME awards tour is a useful barometer of where pop is headed. Last year's bash gave White Lies and Friendly Fires a springboard while Florence and the Machine ­predicted the dominance of female ­electro-pop. But 2010 marks a stern, post-­recessionary return to white-boy indie guitar bands, as if insisting we've had enough musical haute cuisine now, and must again be force fed gruel. The Drums offer an arch take on the old-fashioned, fey guitar groups that the NME featured by the wardrobe-load ­following the success of the Smiths. Bowl-cutted crooner Jonathan Pierce's line, "I thought my life would get easier, instead it's ­getting darker [and] colder," is pure ­Morrissey, but sits ­uncomfortably with the band's teeth-clenched, forced ­wackiness. At one point, the bassist leaps around ­dementedly with an unplayed ­tambourine, and the overall effect is akin to ­making a profound point while sitting on a whoopee cushion. The Big Pink have a female ­drummer, their most radical gesture in an ­otherwise determinedly blokey array of leather jackets and zillions of effects pedals. The resulting racket echoes ­(literally) the Jesus and Mary Chain but the sense of deja vu they create is more to do with the heavy exposure they received last year. Still, in a larger venue you can finally hear their melodies. Their stadium-sized hit Dominoes rouses an until-now bewildered crowd who prefer to pump fists to Bombay Bicycle Club, a quiet-loud indie guitar band who seem to have made it into their 20s without hearing anything except quiet-loud indie guitar bands. But all of these acts could do a lot worse than follow the example of the Maccabees, a "landfill indie" cygnet who transformed into a swan with the 2009 album Wall of Arms. A cross between Dexys Midnight Runners, Arcade Fire and the kind of brass band who are named after a colliery, their arrival with electronica and tubas feels like the onset of colour TV after a life in monochrome. The trembling-voiced Orlando Weeks may be driven by deeper desires than a wish to get in to NME, and their ­personal but epic songs are ­perfect for ­hollering drunkenly into the air ­during an ­existential crisis. They even have a bash at Orange Juice's sublime Rip It Up from 1983, a time when white-boy indie ­guitar bands could experiment with black music and funk and still get ­blanket ­coverage in the NME. Who would have thought it?