Last week one of my favourite bands released a new album, A Thousand Suns. Although only their 4^th studio album, Linkin Park have released many other albums including an EP, remixes, mash-ups (with Jay-Z) and live albums. The two singers, Chester and Mike, have also released solo albums in the last few years. Many people associate Linkin Park with their first two albums - Hybrid Theory & Meteora - being loud, teenage angsty screaming mixed with rap and heavy guitars: but this album is a whole new kettle of fish. In fact, were it not for that fact that I can recognise Mike and Chester's voices, I would not have guessed that A Thousand Suns was by Linkin Park at all. It's in a whole new genre - it's not quite rock, it's not quite hip-hop, it's not electronica either - but it certainly borrows from all of these. It's even a little bit Post Rock. No more screaming (well, one song), instead a lot of melodic tunes mixed with interesting techno sound effects, speaking parts and voice changes.

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Wow. Never have I been to a gig where the band where so into interacting with the crowd. Maybe it's because the lead singer, Jared Leto is also a Hollywood actor and knows how to work people, but it was just incredible. A lot of bands don't seem bothered to go past "Hello <insert city>!" and maybe the odd "Having a good time?!" but 30STM took it to a whole new level. I saw Lostprophets last week, and whilst their random Welsh banter in between songs was funny, they weren't that interactive. How a band are live sometimes makes or breaks it for me - for example in 2004 I was so disappointed with Evanescence's lack of enthusiasm or crowd interaction I went off them for a bit, I certainly won't be seeing them again live.

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I don't normally feel the urge to do music reviews, but I need to express my love for 30STM and their latest album, This is War, which was released on Monday.

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I made this script a while back now to populate a database with all the music on my computer (so excuse any poor Python!). It assumes you are on Windows and have all your music in one folder, arranged by artist with sub folder albums with songs in them. It also assumes you'll use PostgreSQL, but it's trivial to change this to mySQL or even SQLite which comes with Python2.5 or higher. You can tell it to ignore certain folders by adding to the ignorables set. It will automatically grab any album art it finds and try and get the genre, track number and composer etc from MP3 meta data (I couldn't find a way of doing any other kind of music type).

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