The number changes slightly but the idea is always the same: general publishing wisdom has it that even if a book and its buyer are a match made in heaven, it will still take that buyer about five impressions before he or she finally buys the book. That means your average buyer has to see the cover in an ad, read the title in a review, or see copies in the bookstore five times before they’ve gleaned enough information to pull the trigger. Of course there are exceptions; I’m sure everyone waiting for the Harry Potter book didn’t have to be told twice, let alone five times. But it’s an interesting metric nonetheless, and one publishers are always trying to bring down.

For Greenwich band Lucky Soul, my number was three. Number one: Frank, whose lead post on the Long Blondes—which, by the way, is yet another ace UK band you’ll want to check out—segued into an enthusiastic paragraph and a link to impression number two, courtesy of Popmatters. I skimmed the review—that’s right, didn’t even bother to read it—before discovering impression number three, a YouTube video for “Add Your Light To Mine, Baby.” After that I hit the Amazon UK site, and am currently pondering the checkout button. But if there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that recommendations from people you trust are far more effective than ones you don’t, because while checking my inbox for a prior Amazon UK e-mail, I discovered a two-week-old e-mail that serves as a belated impression number four:

We’ve noticed that customers who have expressed interest in “The Deep Blue” by Charlotte Hatherley have also ordered “The Great Unwanted (Ruffa Lane)” by Lucky Soul. For this reason, you might like to know that “The Great Unwanted (Ruffa Lane)” will be released on 9 April 2007. You can pre-order your copy for just £9.99 by following the link below.

Is this a sign that Amazon’s recommendations are actually beginning to work? They’re certainly right about Lucky Soul—the syrupy 60s orchestral pop of “Add Your Light to Mine, Baby” and “Lips Are Unhappy” is just the ticket for the spring-turning-to-summer that’s just around the corner. Everyone’s already covered the Saint Etienne/Cardigans/Pipettes angles, but Ali Howard’s helium vocals remind me most of an old Swedish pop band called Cinnamon, which means Lucky Soul hits lots of sweet spots for me. Not only that, but anyone that knows me understands that I’m a sucker for pop music with trumpets—call it latent guilt for dropping my trumpet playing halfway through high school. One of these days I’m totally going to buy a trumpet and annoy the neighbours with my impromptu re-enactments of early Motown and Burt Bacharach tracks, but until then the likes of Lucky Soul will do just fine.

As for people like myself and Frank, who are theoretically here to point you to music you don’t necessarily know about yet, I don’t think we need to watch our backs too closely yet. But clearly their recommendations-bot is closer to sentience than we thought; if it pulls a Skynet we’re all in trouble.