For all the talk of declining sales, the British music press has lost none of its ability to influence public taste. This year's most talked-about new artists - the Strokes, the White Stripes and Andrew WK - have been talked about not because of radio or TV exposure, but because of relentless hype from the music press. And now we have the Upstarts tour, sponsored by the NME, which offers three new bands ripe for overheating and lavishing with lurid praise.
Californian openers the Pattern offer an endearingly ham-fisted take on the old MC5 and Stooges blueprint. They lack the pop nous of the similarly minded Strokes, but have an admirable grasp of brevity - every song is dispatched in less than two minutes - and an unself- conscious attitude to on-stage theatrics. "I'm down on my knees!" points out their lead singer, dropping to his knees. The sparse audience is unmoved by attempts to kick out the jams, but you can't blame the band for trying.
If the Pattern are devoted to the late 1960s, youthful trio Crackout take their inspiration from early-1990s grunge: I Am the One steals its bitter whine from the Smashing Pumpkins and its lurching dynamics from Nirvana. It's played with a winningly naive enthusiasm that occasionally gets the better of singer Mark Gibbon, whose accent sometimes smacks more of Brooklyn than the band's home town of Bicester.
Headliners Vex Red have been groomed for greatness by heavy metal producer Ross Robinson. The Aldershot quintet sound nothing like Slipknot, Robinson's most famous charges, but they ooze confidence. Singer Terry Abbott has his angsty emoting down to a fine art - he even sings the chorus of Christina Aguilera's Genie in a Bottle with an alienated sneer - and the band add clanking industrial samples to their gothy, distorted noise. Their icy, melodramatic sound strains at the confines of the small venue, but though it may sound over-inflated tonight, it's tailor-made for the stadiums that they will soon be inhabiting .
· NME Upstarts is at the Barfly, Cardiff, tonight, then tours to Bristol and Oxford. Details: 0870 166 3663.
