"And I love what you've done with your hair... oh yeah!"

I love it when music makes me happy! & tonight, it's been doing just that.

I heard The Ark's "Echo Chamber" when it was posted on Fluxblog a year and a half ago, totally loved it, & I've been looking for We Are the Ark at record stores ever since (unsuccessfully) [1].

So anyway, I was thrilled to read tonight on The Tofu Hut that The Ark have a new album, "State of the Ark" [2], which is streamable on The Ark's official website.

And also, & on a related note, I picked up the new Darkness album yesterday, and it's just brilliant—they're embracing their inner Queen even more than before. [3] This post does a better job than I could of describing how awesomely rawk the Darkness are (& also raves quite a bit about The Ark).

[1] I could've just bought it off of Amazon, but I hate paying import prices for music that should rightly have been released in the US. It just doesn't seem fair!

[2] Which has been out in Europe for awhile, and which may (?) be released in the US in 2006.

[3] I had only heard snippets of "One Way Ticket," the first single, before buying the album—and I seriously thought I'd accidentally bought the wrong CD when it started with a fucking panflute. But it's all part of the fun!