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For most bands, taking a decade off from recording can mean risking the permanent loss of the musical thread. Not so for the inimitable Kate Pierson and Fred Schneider, who will always sound just like themselves. Long-awaited new LP "Funplex" is electric, irreverent, and clever.

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The Canadian duo's electronic-pop-meets-Nintendo-core sends '80s babies into a nostalgic hyper state. They've have steadily amassed a cult following over the last several years, and considering that hipsters lean more toward electronica these days, we're sure it will only increase.

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Not only isn't the St. Louis artist a garden-variety hip-hopper, he's not even a garden-variety soul-hop/jazz/rocker. Spade mixes the hybrid's familiar moves--glowing basslines; an earthy, organic vibe--with trickier rhythmic forays and unpredictable production.

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Those crazy guys behind the LimeWire file-sharing application have set up a DRM-free music store--LimeWire Store--where users can choose from 500,000 MP3s, taken from the catalogs of absolutely no major labels. Alternatively, users can download free, lossless versions of millions of songs from every major label using the usual LimeWire "technique." Which, RIAA lawyers would likely argue, is illegal.

If skepticism were a flavor of ice cream, we'd be sitting here with the world's most excruciating brain freeze. Napster managed to redeem itself by having its name bought by another company, having its … Read more

Apple on Tuesday announced that version 3.1 of its Safari browser is available for both Mac and Windows users.

The Web browser now supports a number of new Web standards: HTML 5's latest audio and video tags, as well as CSS Animations. Apple claims that page load times in Safari 3.1 are 1.9 times faster than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 and 1.7 times faster than Mozilla's Firefox 2, and that JavaScript runs as much as six times faster in the new Safari than in other browsers.

Apple offers Safari as a free download. … Read more

In the Secretly Canadian group's debut LP, Jeff Mangum's raw folk aesthetic meets, of all things, the sort of distortion fogs now obsessing the Magnetic Fields. Topped with a Vampire Weekend-esque interest in grammar and a Shins-y tragicomic touch, it amounts to sublimely blended indie rock.

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A hip-hop student of the older-than-old-school radio jock Marley Marl, New York-proud Pete Rock has built a solid career on equally sturdy rhymes and decent beats that skate the line between thug rap and backpacker hip-hop. If Nas wasn't so militant or if Wu Tang were consolidated into one person, the result would be very Pete.

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He's from upstate New York, but he fits right in here in Austin, Texas with his could-be-from-the-south songwriter style. This is a live shot of AA Bondy at the Creekside Lounge on Wednesday. There was a drunk heckler in the crowd who claimed he was "feelin' it" but his sincerity was questionable. Other fans (like myself) kept our comments to ourselves and quietly enjoyed his heartfelt performance, which was nice mellow break from all the chaos and "butt rock" blaring nearby on 6th street.

We've selected AA Bondy for our Best of SXSW feature, … Read more

Hunting down dastardly captcha hackers and spyware slimeballs is busy work, even for a man as talented as Power Downloader. Power doesn't have a lot of free time, so it's hard to remember to check all the Web sites that are important to him. His solution: instead of surfing a list of bookmarks, Power Downloader uses RSS feeds and FeedDemon to make the news and podcasts come to him.

FeedDemon is one of the best programs for managing your RSS collection. The interface is slick and easy to personalize, which is important since Power wasn't too impressed … Read more