For the last couple of months Grass Widow has been on my list of great bands that I failed to discover during 2009, and only came across during a trawl of Top 100 lists at the end of December. After an awful lot of repeated listens I’ve promoted the album ‘Grass Widow’ to one of my absolute favourites of 2009. Like The Drums’ ‘Summertime’, every track feels like the centre of the album. Grass Widow songs have the raw feel of first-attempt rehearsals, and evoke the naive joy of the much-missed Brighton trio Electrelane and the discordant mishmash of early Deerhoof.

They’re brilliant. And while I’m happy to have found them now, the question for me remains: how does one find out about new music these days? I sign up to plenty of blog RSS feeds, (over)use Spotify and read Boomkat newsletters – but in the absence of a trusted print music magazine or the Peel show, I still feel at a loss how to avoid missing a new band like Grass Widow.

Listen to Grass Widow on Spotify.

And while I’m ranting… I’m inordinately happy that Spotify have developed an update to their Spotify iphone app, currently with Apple for approval. The update will add Last.fm scrobbling functionality to the mobile app, meaning that my Last.fm profile should soon be a far better reflection of what I’m actually listening to. That I’m so pleased by this is, I realise, troublingly sad.