Something I wrote for my University indie magazine about '29' by Ryan Adams:

‘29’ is not like other Ryan Adams albums. There’s no stand out radio-friendly pop hits or songs that would be included in the soundtrack of The OC. This is the darker side of Ryan Adams. He has always had his depressing moments but they are sprinkled all through his back catalogue. Here he paints the places his grew up (the southern states of the USA) in this otherworldly light that makes them dirtier and more romantic than they probably are. Love songs turn into stories which turn into warnings. This is what ‘The Queen is Dead’ was to kids in the US. The British get to peer into bar room brawls. They get to go on journeys along dusty roads to diners who hold women with pasts murkier than the Strawberry Wine Adams’ warns us against. This album has a specific identity. It fuses country, punk and pop together, to haunt you with the same feelings you get from copious amounts of bourbon. It has burning self-loathing and depressed nostalgia and confessions of the emptiness from all of his lost loves. He manages to reach the heights of so many emotions but it’s the aura of bitterness that mutes it and stops the album from being too ‘woe is me’ and self-indulgent.  

It's such a disappointment. It was suppose to be for the others, the ones that were different, but had grown up a bit and were embracing the fact they were so much better than everyone else. That their musical taste was a sneering and beautiful two fingers up to everybody who wanted to conform. Now it's worse than heat magazine. Heat magazine knows what it is. It has opinions. NME is just bland, bland, bland. It's aimed at the sort of people who in 2 years will hate the music that is being called 'indie'.

The letters page are full of idiots who sound like the same person over and over again. And when someone has a differing opinion, they point it out and laugh. NME is made for the sort of people who are bullies. The sort of people who wish they were like whatever's coming off the assembly line this week.

NME used to be about making a great magazine for a specific group of people, but they've become a crowd pleaser. Like a band that makes a second album exactly the same as the first, hoping to rake in just as much cash. Their main priority is making as much cash as they can while Hard-Fi, Razorlight, Kaiser Chiefs and all the other bland, lifeless bands that are popular. And they may be popular for a little while. But NME know that given a couple of years, no-one will be buying the magazine. They've alienated the people that want to hear interesting, new music (who would have been a smaller but more loyal audience) for hipsters.

From even before Primark sold skinny jeans and the Daily Mirror were constantly following Pete Doherty around, NME was getting disappointing. If it wants to be a mainstream magazine, it can have it's 5 minutes of glory. But if it had stayed true to its own writers and fans it would still be in the hearts of the people that used to think it actually matters.

However this weeks had a nice glossy picture of Marc Bolan (currently in vogue due to a greatest hits album coming out) which is very lovely and may make its way onto my wall.