NME has rather lost its zing recently. The style of reviews, always a little preposterous, has spiralled ever further up its own nonsensical bottom, and is forever using the kind of silly comparisons -'it's the Stooges and Bjork fighting over the last Smiths record on earth', for example - which poor music writing is famed for. Whilst there are a couple of good writers, notably the splendidly splenetic Stephen Wells, and Victoria Segal, there's no-one approaching the brilliance of its late 70s heyday.
It deals with a wider musical range than ever before, which is good, and regularly features the likes of Destiny's Child or Oxide and Neutrino on the cover, though its core readership still listens to guitar music more than anything else. But in an increasingly competitive marketplace it appears increasingly desperate and has, for example, recently indulged in a pointless style revamp (I much preferred the old look) and a move to a glossy cover, which does look nice but may be dangerously close to alienating those readers who are under the mistaken impression that reading the NME makes them part of some underground counterculture.
Its greatest flaws are the same as they always have been: a rather tragic uppity self-aggrandisement which makes it impossible to take anything they say seriously, and a tendancy to overhype new bands to a totally absurd extent, only to ignore them/rampantly take the piss out of them a few months later. I've lost count of the number of bands who've been hailed in absurdly hyperbolic terms: this week's heroes, to take a random example, are Athlete, about whom NME say: 'if we were to call them one of the greatest Britpop bands we've heard in the last five years, we'd be doing them a slight disservice.' This is all very well if such praise is meted out once in a blue moon, but it's not: it's every bloody week. Last year their big favourites were The Strokes, who they hyped to such an absurd degree that when they finally released their quite-good-but-not-very-good first album they simply had to give it 10 out of 10 and hail it as the greatest thing since sliced bread when it was in fact a reasonable Velvet Underground rehash.
Still, for all that, they write passionately about current music, they care about politics, a rare thing for magazines aimed at 16-30s, and they still regularly feature excellent interviews, the most interesting letters page in any music magazine, and regularly make me aware of exciting music which I might not otherwise have heard of. And they're still streets ahead of the god-awful Q. They ain't by any means perfect, but they're all there is, really. And they aren't bad.