i'm wide awake, it's morning

I found some new music I liked today, something that had been sitting on my HDD for ages, but I just could not be bothered to listen to it. You know how it is, you have your set artists that you listen to intensively for a period (for me at the moment, Interpol, Death Cab for Cutie, The Feeling, The Fratellis and Lily Allen [more below]). However, for the past couple of weeks, I have been in that transition phase where I don't really know what I want to listen to so I just let iTunes choose things at random and inspire me, but sadly without much inspiration. So today, I set out to discover The Arcade Fire. I had heard their new single 'No Cars Go' on Radio 2 on saturday afternoon, and enjoyed it. Then something from their old album came on in the interlude at Lily Allen last night, so today I dug out the copy Maddy had given me as part of a CD one time, but that I had just ignored because I didn't know it. And let me say that it is good - so good in fact that I felt I knew most of the songs already, as they were being played! So finally, I think I might have something that will enable me to give Interpol a little rest - I'm scared of getting bored of them! And just for the sake of completeness, I also listened to the Bright Eyes for the first time, hence the title of this post.

Aaaaaand, as I hinted to above, I went to see Lily Allen in concert at the Hammersmith Apollo last night. She was great, albeit a bit pissed. She covered Blondie's 'Heart of Glass', and the Kaiser Chiefs' 'Oh My God' - both brilliant! One complaint I had though, and this is true of pretty much every concert I have been to, is that the music is so loud that it both drowns out the singer, and seems to 'max-out' the speakers, so everything sounds treble-y and strained. I hope somebody else knows what I mean. Anyway, the best thing about the whole night was my driving: I drove into pretty much central London for the first time in my life, and thankfully, it went well. One tiny hiccough on the way, when I naively followed the signs rather than my good sense and the map and google earth, but we got back on track pretty soon and relatively stress-free, so that was good. Finally, do take a look at Brian's blog post about Lily - I agree fully with his wisdom!