Bat For Lashes

Music has always played a very large role in my life. In the past two years I've been using this website called last.fm which tracks every song I play and it compiles the stats into a nicely organized categories.

For example, here are my stats - pretty much everything I've been listening to since the last days of December 2006.

However, one of the most interesting aspects to last.fm is the ability to discover new music. What I mean is, say you really like the band Elbow. You can select last.fm radio and type in "Elbow" as the artist, and it will compile a playlist of songs which are similar to their style. So when listening to "Elbow Radio" on last.fm, I might get an Elbow track, followed by Turin Brakes, followed by Doves, then The Dears... and maybe a few bands I've never heard of.

Or say you like Final Fantasy (the musician, not the video game... although the video game is good too!). If you type in Final Fantasy, your playlist might be a mix of Grizzly Bear, Arcade Fire, Patrick Wolf, and Andrew Bird.

You don't necessarily have to enter in a band's name to get a streaming playlist of random music. You can also enter keywords: dreamy, Canadian, British, funky jazz, and so on.

This isn't anything new. Pandora, for example, has been offering this kind of service for years. But for whatever reason, I really like last.fm's infrastructure and it has quite an active online community. But I find that last.fm is something that people only "get" once they start using it - it's hard to appreciate its intricacies otherwise.

Well, my whole point to this is... I forget what keyword I entered, but the other day I discovered a beautiful song by a band called "Bat For Lashes". Needless to say, it's my latest musical infatuation.

See for yourselves: