NME: THE ALBUM 2009

A quick album review of state of the EDL-dream nation record, landfill indie comp NME: The Album 2009

V/A, NME: The Album 2009

When octagenarian smut-pedlar Ken Russell (ask yer dad) claimed that The Big Pink were 'Kerouac meets Cagney', every British alarm bell should have been sounded. Beacons lit. Emergency frequencies commandeered by the government. Every man on every ship semaphoring the message: INDIE IS FUCKING DEAD.

Nothing against Russell personally but judging by his films, his artistic sensibility lies halfway between a used copy of Razzle (ask yer dad) and one of those Diana plates they sell in the Daily Mail.

If a journey to the cerebral cortex of Jo Whiley sounds like fun, this is the stocking filler for you. The two discs overflow with chance-free identikit sewage. The only thing that differentiates Friendly Fires, Passion Pit and Temper Trap is the space they take up. Even their names are basically the same.

What makes this truly nauseating: in a year where Jay-Z and Dizzee Rascal annexed rock radio, it doesn't feel remiss to note that there is one black musician on this entire 40-track record. If we take the average members per band to be four, then out of 160 musicians then basically we've got ourselves a self-congratulatory white-boy skinny-jeans jungvolk circle-jerk that makes Caligula look like Jim Davidson.

Worse still, there's so much co-opting of ethnic sounds that it begins to feel like a deliberate up-yours to every ethnicity; afro-beat guitars, drum circles and tribal imagery. Talk about fetishing colonial times: there's even a band called Bombay Bicycle Club. Hand, staple, forehead.

The genre that used support the miners and smash down Babylon has become Scrooge McDuck, backstroking in its own affluence. This is the perfect soundtrack to usher David Cameron into power; youthful, white middle-class, devoid of substance and potentially cretinous.