Website Of The Week – NME

http://www.nme.com/

This week, the NME website is up for review again due to its recent relaunch. For many, the NME has been a bible at some point in their lives. As an adolescent it was an entity I ritually bought and read cover to cover, not just for the obvious reasons of wanting to keep up to date on the current music scene (man!), but as much as to really understand the meaning of ‘teenage angst’. However, like most things, I eventually grew out of it.

I have to say that, for me, a publication loses something when it goes ‘online’, and the NME is no exception. Reading reviews and interviews from a computer screen is not quite the same as leafing through a newspaper (for a start you don’t get your fingers dirty). As well as this, the site itself is actually quite badly designed. The colour scheme features little more than the primary colours and their immediate descendants, and the layout leaves a lot to be desired.

There are advantages to a website over a newspaper of course, especially in this subject matter as there are numerous albums/singles which you can download and listen to – a rather interactive novelty. It is also an invaluable source where tour dates are concerned as it is constantly being updated – I’ve got my eye on the Massive Attack tour!

The links on this site are fairly well thought out, and you can subscribe to the paper itself as well as access archive material. My main problem with this website however is one which can be levelled at NME as a whole, and involves more the style of writing than the site. Although, admittedly, there are good writers and bad writers, the general cynicism and self-indulgent pretentiousness of the tone of NME can occassionally be too much to bare. Bland pages punctuated with a funky photo here and there cannot make up for this in any shape or form.

So there we have it. The on-line NME is a precious source of information where gigs, releases and charts are concerned. Of course, it provides information on much more than that, which is a good thing if you don’t mind the way in which it’s presented!

Reviewer: Deborah Bonello