Kasabian: Perhaps the best band Britain has to offer?
Everyone knows my views on prize-giving ceremonies but even I couldn’t help being pleasantly surprised to see Kasabian scoop best album at this year’s NME Awards for their extraordinary third LP West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum. A huge creative leap from the leaden glam-rock of 2006’s sophomore effort Empire, it’s a staggering blast of the very finest Britrock.
NME: The Best of at Least Six Months Ago
Does anyone really care who wins at this month’s NME Awards bash in London? Little more than an annual opportunity for the flailing print magazine to hype the bands it hopes will sell copies, it’s long lost the aura of importance it once had. In the era of blogosphere-fueled success stories, the very notion of an awards ceremony feels painfully dated. We already know who everyone rates. We read the blogs, subscribe to the feeds, chat on Twitter and hook up on Facebook. By the time the “Best New Band” are drunkenly clutching their statuette we’ll have already moved on to the next.
So what about this year’s candidates? In the aforementioned “Best New Band” category, The Big Pink, Bombay Bicycle Club, Mumford & Sons, The xx and La Roux feel like they’ve been around for ages. In the case of The Big Pink and Bombay Bicycle Club, it’s hard to appreciate that their debut albums are only a matter of months old, such has been the extent of online hype surrounding them. Between the two of them, The xx and La Roux have dominated the last year in British music, hitting heights far beyond anything that could have been achieved before the advent of the internet.
