featuring technology tips and music recommendations with a personal touch

The Backstreet Boys are back with an undeniably strong album (Associated Content)

Pound for pound and song for song, Unbreakable may just be the best pop album of the year so far (SputnikMusic)

If you are looking for an album of pure pop pleasure, you can not do much better with current releases than Unbreakable (About.com)

The list goes on. Everybody’s talking how great BSB’s new sixth album, Unbreakable, is. BSB has never done such an exceptional job producing authentic music before. Ironically, it took the departure of former member, Kevin Richardson, on June 2006 for the band to reach this heightened level of surreal music production. I’m not saying he wasn’t an influence, I’m just saying the band’s just doing as good as (and even better than) ever!

So as you can tell, I had a hard time picking out a featured song. Should I have gone with the first single, Inconsolable, which received massive radio playback and which everybody by now have hard, or the less heard, bonus track, Downpour, which I simply fell in love with by the first listen. Well, I chose the latter. Hope you enjoy it :)

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How does one do Bon Jovi a justifiable review in one post? That’s what I started asking myself when I got to writing this post, where I’m bringing you the first single from Bon Jovi’s 10 studio album, Lost Highway.

The good thing about Bon Jovi though is that you don’t need to introduce him to anyone, since they’re most likely been to one of his 2500 concerts in over 50 countries world-wide, bought one of his 10 studio albums which sold 125 million copies all around the world, or simply heard one of his hit singles being played on radio. So let’s skip the introductions and get right down to it.

Lost Highway is album with a haunting set of 12 new and original sounding songs, is a stunning, multi-layered look into the nature of love and life in all its glory. It focuses on the light that love brings. The first single on this album, Lost Highway, is spectacular song to say the least, both in terms of meaning and melody.

In my rearview mirror
My life is getting clearer

I finally found my way
Said goodbye to yesterday

I’m turning 25 in a month, and I couldn’t possibly find better words to describe my life so far than these simple meaningful words. I’ve done a lot of growing up since my college graduation and I still have a lot more to do, but the amount of change that I’ve gone through seems gigantic in retrospect.

Don’t know where I’m going
But I know where I’ve been
I’m afraid of going back again
So I drive (drive drive)

I do know where I’m going, or at least what I want from life. But I don’t know what life has in store for me. Nobody does. So we just go about "driving" this "lost highway" and hope we get to that nice little town we’ve always dreamed of living in.

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You know the kind of album that’s so good you listen to back to back without skipping a single song, the kind that only comes once or twice a year to remind you that such damn good music and lyrics aren’t long lost nowadays. Well folks, I’m really excited to bring you one today, courtesy of the fabulous Vanessa Carlton.

She’s an American pop singer, songwriter, and pianist best known for the single “A Thousand Miles” from her debut album, Be Not Nobody (2002). Since then, she’s been on and off with albums that achieved mild commercial success. Well, that’s until October 2007, when she released her third studio album, titled Heroes and Thieves. This is the album I’m bringing you today, and it’s the album I think you will simply fall in love with!

Heroes and Thieves sees Vanessa departing from the Goth-influenced darker stuff she was once loved for in her previous albums. Instead, she has now embraced a more romance-inspired, piano-driven mainstream classic pop that is simply brilliant. A lot of improvements are very apparent in this album. The lyrics are very connective and well-related to people of her generation, and she focuses mainly on just love songs instead of overrated “hater songs” we get so many these days.

My favorite song on the album is the second one, Hands On Me. A beautiful song with a catchy arrangement and heart-warming lyrics.

Another great song (actually it’s Vanessa’s favorite from the album) is called Home. A decent song that really captures the elusive meaning of really being “home”.

In the album’s title song, Heroes and Thieves, Vanessa says it’s a song about assessing, to put it in a dramatic way, the Heroes and Thieves in your life. It is about her personal evolution, and her deciding how she wants to lead her life and the people with whom she wants to share it.

A lot of more fabulous songs in this albums are just a click away, so go ahead and enjoy it. I highly recommend purchasing this album to show Vanessa how much you appreciate her efforts of putting together not just a collection of songs, but a body of work!

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After 3 years of musical absence, the magnificent and talented Grammy Award-winning Enrique Iglesias returns with an album that falls nothing short of its predecessors. Honestly, even if Enrique didn’t call this album Insomniac (referring to the many sleepless nights he spent perfecting the tunes in this album), one can easily recognize the amount of hard work that went into making this album a really enjoyable one. I really appreciate artists who put down the effort in making a decent record, and "decent" isn’t good enough word here to describe this amazing and varied album.

Stripping away the Spanish tracks that are mostly translation of their English counterparts in the same album, the rest of the English songs are so good that I had a hard time picking one to recommend in this post. I didn’t want to post all of the songs because I want you guys to go out and buy the album, because this way we can all show Enrique how we appreciate his hard work and dedication to pleasing his fans.

When I go through an entire new album, there is usually one song that just begs for another listen once you play it the first time. In this case, Enrique’s cover of Ringside’s 2005 single Tired Of Being Sorry was the one to really stand out of the rest. It has a kind of intoxicating upbeat rhythm that is accompanied by beautiful Spanish guitar. However, I really don’t get the message of the song. I think it has something to do with vampires and demons. Quite an odd subject, or is it symbolic for something else? If you have any clue, please do enlighten me :)

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Do you remember that old smash hit song by Eiffel 65 called Blue (Da Ba Dee)? I bet you do, it was one of the most popular singles of 1999. Admittedly, I was addicted to the song during my sophomore years. But then I got over it.

The news is, after the band was disbanded in early 2006, a sort of a spin-off band, called Bloom 06, was formed. I didn't come to know of this band until couple of days ago (again, through Last.fm). Being a fan of Eiffel 65, especially their second album called Contact!, I decided to check out this band's debut album (which was supposed to be Eiffel 65's fourth studio album), called Crash Test 01. If you factor out out the italian tracks on this one (since I hate listening to songs I don't understand), the album simply rocks!

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