I subconsciously turned this blog into a very dry and professional one; let's change that.
At Christmas I got hold of an old Denon CD player and amp, and for under £100 I had a pretty decent hifi setup. That sort of tech can't really get old, so it didn't matter that it was ten years since it had been sold as new. I hooked it all up to a pair of Music Series One headphones from Alessandro, on recommendation from Nick, and oh! revelation.
For the first time in a couple of years I have started buying CD's again. For someone who claims to be "into" music, it's not really good enough to listen to MP3 rips all the time - something's got to give when you're listening to a compressed version of a track through a computer on £15 headphones designed for Counterstrike.
I picked up Amy Winehouse's Frank for a fiver, based on the awesomeness of Back To Black. For those who haven't heard it, Back To Black is retro-fine and does a whole lot more to highlight Amy's voice than Frank - an album that is more R&B than retro.
My housemate Lord Laird bought Neon Bible by Arcade Fire, a band who I think were overrated based on their first album. However, MTV2 used to show a live performance of them playing some of the decent tracks from Funeral and that was 10xawesome, and for that reason I was quite looking forward to this new one, and I've not been disappointed. There's a lot less filler on this than on Funeral, and the songs are tighter. The singer's voice isn't as willfully shit, and their "epic" tendencies have ballooned. This is a great album.