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When a lead singer goes off to do a solo album, its pretty much a death-toll for the band. For Rilo Kiley it seems to be just what the band needed. After 3 years since their last album, they are back with what is the Album of the Year for me. Under The Blacklight is a grownup Rilo Kiley who have taken their sound to the next level. With what is sure to cause some tension with long time fans, Under The Blacklight mixes decades of styles to Rilo Kiley’s indie sound. The first cry is going to be “sell out” as this is the first album signed to major label Warner Bros. but anyone who actually knows, their last album More Adventurous was distributed by Warner Bros also.

Every song on the album is distinctive and rememberable. The first single off the album is the sexy and sulty “The Monkeymaker” which is my current favorite. The title track “Under The Blacklight” is a contemporary Kay Hanley-esqe song that allows Jenny to really show off her voice. “Dreamworld” is dreamy mashed-duet between Lewis and Sennett. Another favorite of mine is the ska influenced To Catch a Predator anthem “15″ which Jenny’s cracking voice leaves you with impure thoughts. The last track “Give a Little Love” is a perfect ending track that gives us a little 80’s love.

Track Listing:

1. “Silver Lining”
2. “Close Call”
3. “The Moneymaker”
4. “Breakin’ Up”
5. “Under The Blacklight”
6. “Dreamworld”
7. “Dejalo”
8. “15″
9. “Smoke Detector”
10. “The Angels Hung Around”
11. “Give A Little Love”

I hate to make this comparison, but this feels very similar to what My Chemical Romance did with there experimental album The Black Parade. Each song is new and fresh. You can tell band is having fun playing all these songs. Jenny really shows off her vocal talents by mixing up different styles. There is something for everyone here, even die-hard fans who feel they sold-out. This is easily the Album of the Year in my eyes and 2008 is going to be the year of Rilo Kiley.

One of my favorite bands, Cauterize, has recently released a new album called Disguises. This is the first album released on Darrin Pfeiffer of Goldfinger’s label High 4 Records. First off after looking at the track list you notice that its basically their independent release Paper Wings with 4 new tracks. Since I have Paper Wings, the album doesn’t do too much for me. When broken down there are 4 new songs, 2 re-recorded songs and 6 remastered songs. The new songs are good with my favorite song on the whole album being Don’t Stop Now. My favorite song off of Paper Wings, Closer, was also re-recorded and will serve as the first single off the album. For being one of my favorite bands, its sucks a little to only get 4 new tracks after 2 years but the new songs are awesome. Don’t Stop Now and Slivers rock. The band has gotten heavier with there sound over the years and it really shows.

Since I was one of the first 500 people to pre-order the new CD, I was send a 5 song acoustic CD called Unmasked. Also both CD covers have been autographed by the band which was a nice touch. If anyone wants to check them out, go to their Myspace page to stream some tracks from the new album.

Bandwagon, the iTunes backup program, has finally released their version of software that supports backup to an FTP server. They have had a version that supported Amazon’s S3 service for a couple months now but now you can backup to any FTP server including another computer on your local network. I tested it last night by backing up my iTunes music to a Buffalo Linkstation I have on my LAN. The 40 gigs of data took about 2 hours to backup so speed was good. I’m probably going to try a backup to my Dreamhost site soon but thats going to take some time. Everything worked great except the app was always at 100% CPU usage when it was running. The program is in beta so bugs are expected. For a first release tho, it offers a great way to backup your iTunes library locally or offsite.

Also they are offering a free 6 months to any blogger who posts about the release. Just make a post, not unlike this one, and post a trackback to the post on their blog and you will get a code good for a 6 months free.

I’m a little late with this but last week CBS bought one of my favorite social networking sites Last.fm. Last.fm is based on audioscrobbler technology and tracks what the music you listen to setup a social network of friends, neighbors with similar tastes, and new music you might like based on what you listen too. They also offer streaming music based off all those criteria if you have a paid account. Not really sure were CBS is going to take the site but I’m interested to see what corporate backing is going to bring to the table. Since the site is based in the UK, they were one of the sites that missed a bullet with the recent FCC changes to streaming music. Either way I’m happy for the guys that run the site. The site is amazing and keeps getting updated every few months with new features and fixes. Lets just hope it only gets better now.

Fall Out Boy did a rocking cover of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” tonight at the NE Dodge Music Center here in Hartford. The video is kinda shitty as I shot it from my digital camera from pretty far away. I really need to look at a actually video camera soon.

Thanks from a last minute tip from a friend, I picked up tickets for Video Games Live here at Yale University for Saturday night. This was the first time VGL has been to a University and they packed in about 3000 people into Woolsey Hall. The concert lasted just over 3 hours and it was simply awesome. The song and arrangement selections were fun and inspiring. The pacing of the show was brilliant. They broke up the arrangements with interactive on stage contests, monologue, introduction from various video game composers and a 20 min intermission.

One part of the show was to bring up someone from the audience and have them win money from playing Space Invaders. The catch was the Orchestra would be playing the music in realtime and the person would have to play the game interactively. So you had to run around the stage to move your position on the screen. All they gave the kid was a firing button and a T-shirt to wear with the space invader ship on the back so it would like like the ship was moving on stage just like the screen. The kicker to this whole thing is the kid they brought up was about 350 lbs and the T-shirt they gave him was a medium at best, I don’t know who the hell he fit into this thing but it just added to the fun of the whole evening.

The highlight of the evening tho comes from the 104 year old pipe organ that the Video Game Pianist, Martin Leung, played different tracks from Castlevania on. Hearing Moonlight Nocturne was absolutely amazing.

I wish I got the Castlevania performance on video but i was so into it, I didn’t even stop to think until it was too late.

[Video of the Opening]
[Picture of the Stage]

If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time trying to keep your music collection backed up. If your library is relatively small, you can use iTunes 7’s built-in backup to burn to DVD. Thats all fine and dandy unless you have a large collection. In my case I need to keep my iTunes library on an external hard drive due to my Macbook’s hard drive being too small to support it. This poses a problem as now I need an additional external hard drive just to back up my music. I would buy an iPod and keep everything sync’d to there but I’m waiting for the 120GB Widescreen video before taking that route.

This is were Mp3tunes.com comes in. They are now offering unlimited storage for free accounts. This means I can sync my entire iTunes music library and now have it backed up to an offsite server for free. Plus I can sync my library with other computers and stream my entire library wherever I have an internet connection.

You use a program called Oboe Sync that scans your collection and will only uploads what has been added or changed. There is a Oboe Sync client for Windows, Mac and Linux so no one is left out. There are also plugins for iTunes, Mac and PC, and Winamp that allows streaming of your locker. In the case of the iTunes plugin, you see your locker show up under the Shared music source list. Files are streamed at 128kbps so its CD quality.

While everything sounds perfect. There are some caveats:

1) It only sync’s music, no video files so any iTunes TV shows or Movies you have, you still need to back those up on your own. It will sync DRM’d music tho.
2) Syncing takes along time. This is due to your internet connection. Upload speeds tend to be a lot slower than download. For a 42GB library, I’ve been syncing for about a week on and off.
3) The Obeo plugin for iTunes (Mac) is not Universal binary yet.
4) All new free accounts do not have unlimited storage right away. They are adding the unlimited storage to free accounts in waves. It took me about a week after I signed up before my account was converted to unlimited.

If you’re looking for a way to backup your music collection, look no father. The price is right, free, and you have the added bonus of being able to stream your music anywhere and keep multiple computers sync’d with the same library.

[Sign up now]