Lily Allen - Straight To Hell

Straight To Hell has always been my favorite favourite Clash song, so it's a pretty sure thing that if someone covers it, I'm going to listen. Lily's version is...fine I guess. It's from a charity album put together by an organization called War Child, which is a pretty good name for a group that aims to protect children living in war zones. I can get behind that.

People search for Lily Allen like crazy

An anecdotal curiosity that I'd like to share:

PulverRadio, as you may know if you're one of my transplanted readers, is no more. But nobody's unplugged the web server yet, so although there's a farewell message in place of the home page, for the time being you can still find all the content that was ever there if you know where to look. Google, as you might have guessed, knows exactly where to look.

Out of curiosity today, I took a look at the site stats since we shut down the streams. Unsurprisingly, they're not as high as they once were. What caught my eye, though, was how many people continue to land on the blog pages that have pictures of, or even mention of, Lily Allen. As a search term, Lily Allen outweighs the next most popular term (Kill Hannah, wtf?) by an order of magnitude.

Personally, I think Lily is good, not great. I've often marveled at the amount of blog bandwidth dedicated to the "news" whenever she posts to her myspace page, but perhaps it's all because I'm not the first to have noticed how many people are searching for her. I never once wrote about Amy Winehouse on the old blog (what?), but I'm willing to bet she's similarly traffic-friendly.

Not a jab at anyone who writes about these ladies. Just interesting, is all.

Out today: CYHSY, Youth Group, Lily Allen

Fans who preordered this were allowed early access to the mp3 files, so the most faithful have been sounding off on this record for some time already. As was expected, given the crushing weight of the hype surrounding Brooklyn's Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (even the WSJ is onto these guys), some people love it and some don't. Don't expect anyone calling this the #1 record of 2007 in December, but don't hold it against them.

Honestly, with all the blahblahblogging that's been going on about Ms. Allen for months, I really thought this record was already out. She's already been playing shows in the US and stuff. But apparently the record only came out here today. Listening to Lily Allen makes me want to lift my knees higher and move my arms more when I walk.

Last year was a fruitful one for Youth Group. They had a tour with Death Cab and songs on The OC (including a sweet "Forever Young" cover, which you can hear here and buy here). Neither of which hurt sales of Skeleton Jar. Some people think Youth Group is emo, but some people think everything is emo.