Check out my new favourite band, The Decemberists, (www.decemberists.com).

Hailing from Portland, Oregon - they're featured in this month's issue of the UK's finest magazine, The Word, and play a kind of quirky, experimental pop-indie-folk melange with a good helping of melancholy, blood and gore, with songs on their latest album 'The Crane Wife' covering subjects from Japanese folk tales (the title track) to Northern Ireland in the 1970s and the US Civil War.

And they're really rather good.

Last song on the iPod (well, it had to be after that!): The Decemberists - Yankee Bayonet