Piano-pop music (a bit similar to Ben Folds). Really like the album, but the incessant repetition of some of the lyrics goes on my nerves, as do the Hallelujahs.
Stand-outs: Dance Anthem of the 80’s, Eet, The Calculation.
Other music I’ve recently picked up:
65daysofstatic – The Fall of Math
The Tings Tings – We Started Nothing
Anna Ternheim – Seperation Road
Laura Marling – Alas I Cannot Swim
While coding during the last month I’ve been listening to a lot of music via Pandora (a music recommendation service / internet radio station). I’m listing some of the stand-out tracks / artists I’ve enjoyed here
I’ve accidentally stumbled onto Pandora, a twisted combination of a subscription-paid custom-playlist radio station and music discovery service. You enter an artist or song name and it starts playing “similar” music; you can have several of these stations to which you can add more and more interests. The first 10 hours are free, and after that it’s either $12/quarter or $36/year, which IMO is rather fair. You can pause and skip tracks (skipping is limited to a certain number of songs per hour). On the technical side, it just needs flash player 7 and streams in 128kpbs.
Onto a few recommendations. For a few songs I’ve bothered adding iTunes Music Store links simply for convenience:
A bit of product placement:
The new Ben Folds album “Songs for Silverman” is out (in the iTunes Music Store as well — I honestly cannot remember the last time I bought a physical CD), the same goes for Trackmania Sunrise (at least in the UK, Germany is due this Friday, US some-when in May), a fast-paced puzzle/racing game only available for PC; well worth it in any case (EuroGamer review).
Also out this Friday is Apple’s new iteration of MacOS X, Tiger; whether that’s worth paying for is up to each individual; I plan on trying out the overhauled developer tools to finally port my wavelet-toolkit…
Over the past few days I’ve taken a liking to TaQ - Electro Tuned in Dancing Stage Unleashed (on Easy 
). It’s a song I had positively hated before, but now that I “get” squeaky bits (3 notes / steps in a slightly off-beat fashion), it has become immensely enjoyable. It also does not hurt that the song reminds me of the P.N.03 soundtrack. 
I had an extended romp through the newly opened (in England, France and Germany that is — not really an “European” launch) iTunes music store. It is now obvious to me why there is quite a bit of buzz about it. The prices (and more importantly the terms of use) are fair, the selection is decent (by far not perfect — especially the omission of independent labels hurts. Also some artists only seem to feature a subsets of their albums); but what is IMO most important is the ease of use and the excellent integration with iTunes: It is actually fun to buy music. To proove the point, I ended up buying Natalie Merchant’s “Ophelia” album (which I found via the “Thick as Thieves” track in my library)…
Nintendo / Sega ought to get their asses in gear and publish an F-Zero GX soundtrack, the music is awesome! Until that happens, you can get some very nice game-rips here. FilePlanet needed a bit of convincing to give me all the files, but after circumventing their subscription / bandwidth-limitation system (which blatantly tells you that the requested files cannot be found although they are there!) with a bit of URL-fiddling, all is good.
My copy of Yoko Kanno’s “Ghost in the Shell - Stand Alone Complex O.S.T.” arrived, and it is too good to be true…
It contains whole range of styles, one track in particular owes a lot to Björk’s “Hyperballad”, but they all stand very well on their own. The 2nd part of Track 12 - “Silent Cruise” is my absolute favourite though; it mixes strings from the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra with electronic sounds and beats. It’s so good I get a shiver down my spine everytime I listen to it… <sigh>
There are quite a few tracks with English lyrics (even printed in English in the booklet) which are dangerously catchy, so you’ll have to be careful not to get caught singing nonsense-lyrics…
Absolutely recommended!