Album review: Kerrang! The Album ‘08 – [various artists]

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Poor old Kerrang! magazine – billing itself in the gushing promo for this annual compilation album as “the undisputed modern day saviour[s] of rock” – must surely have no idea of how desperate it sounds. The Album ‘08 is supposed to “convince even the most hardened cynic of rock’s good health”… which is odd, because looking through my web browser’s window, I was never under any illusion rock music was in trouble in the first place.

There’s certainly a lot of half-baked tripe clogging up the airwaves, though – and it seems the bulk of the Kerrang! selection is drawn from that body of music. Point in case: the album’s first disc opens with that Kid Rock track. Yes, that one – the schmaltzy rip-off of “Sweet Home Alabama” that ticks all the boxes (sex, booze and drugs!) for crude marketeering and surface-over-substance. Who’s next? Ah, Nickelback’s “Rockstar”, a veritable triumph of modern rock music, really pushing at the envelope with all the vigour and vitality of a geriatric outpatient who’s overdone it on the Co-codamol again.

There are a few tracks on here that aren’t paint-by-numbers tosh – appearances from Biffy Clyro, Dillinger Escape Plan and The Gaslight Anthem, for example – but the rest is like a shitlist of bands that should have laid down and died long ago. Linkin Park; Good Charlotte; Bullet For My Valentine… and a desperate bid to seem in touch with “the kids” sees Pendulum get a look-in too. Yes, Pendulum – the band who managed to make mediocre drum’n'bass palatable to white middle-class teens.

The second CD kicks off with Green Day’s “American Idiot” – a decent tune, though not their best, and (more to the point) nearly five years old. Don’t forget, this is a “state-of-the-rockin’-nation address for 2008″, y’know. Then we get a big run of the usual emo and metal-lite suspects – Fall Out Ego, My Chemical Histrionics, Overhyped Sevenfold, Funeral For A Subgenre – peppered with another handful of grasps for credibility – Billy Talent, Cancer Bats. If this truly was the state of rock and metal in 2008, lovingly mapped and charted by the crew of the good ship Kerrang!, I would be pretty worried.

But I’m not, and nor is anyone else with a broadband connection and an IQ bigger than their shoe size. Because we all know damn well that the best way to find interesting new bands exploring the edge of the ever-multiplying genres of rock and metal is to go out and find them ourselves, instead of waiting for Kerrang! or MTV to spoonfeed our opinions to us. And Kerrang! knows it too; it’s been simultaneously amusing and saddening watching them sashay down the same path to vapid and mediocre populism that the NME trailblazed before them. For all their best efforts, no one who really cares about rock music needs Kerrang! any more; all that remains is to hold on to those unwilling to think for themselves until the administration papers get filed. The rats left the sinking ship long ago, but the band are still playing – and instead of “Nearer My God To Thee” it’s “Keep Your Hands Off My Girl”. All together now…

Based on recent form, someone’s going to chirp up in the comments about how WTF Im a dumass faggot who dunt no good music when I hear it LOL OMG. To those people I say – if you like the music on this compilation, good for you. Now – tell me how many of the tracks you couldn’t have heard (or can still hear) on Radio 1, or on the artist’s MySpace page? The demographic that The Album ‘08 is aimed at will already have the bulk of the tunes it contains, and will certainly have the ones they actually want; it’s most likely to be bought by aunties and uncles who’ve seen a relative who reads Kerrang! while wearing fingerless gloves and are short of ideas on birthday presents for people who use a lot of hair gel.

OK, so the music is largely not my cup of tea, but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. The point is this – less than five years ago, Kerrang! used to give away free compilations with a better roster of tracks than this, every few weeks, glued to the front of the mag. But then – when bands realised that it wasn’t worth paying for the premium ad spaces in the mag that got their tracks onto the CD (oops, did I say that out loud?) because they could get their music into your headphones for free on the web – the last reason for genuine music fans to buy the magazine disappeared.

Kerrang! The Album ‘08 has an obvious line of heritage – it’s the skinny-jeans equivalent of the Now! compilations, and about as good a metric of what’s really happening in the world of music beyond the balance sheets of the increasingly beleaguered major labels. I’m not sure who to pity more – Kerrang! itself, a once-fine magazine that held the UK rock and metal scene together before the internet took over the job, or the decent bands amongst the corporate dross who’ve been drafted in a desperate attempt to reinvigorate a dying brand name.

If you needed proof that print media and the major record labels are dying on their collective arses, Kerrang! The Album ‘08 is surely it.