A brand new copy of the digpak UK release of Within Temptation‘s new album, The Silent Force arrived this morning in an exemplary display of Play.com‘s efficiency (ordered on Thursday afternoon, dispatched Thursday evening, arrived Saturday morning and with free postage to boot). The album, besides looking gorgeous in this special UK digipak edition, is another phenomenal performance from the Dutch band. Maintaining the distinctive style that brought them acclaim in Mother Earth, this record sounds a lot fuller despite lagging with a slight repetiveness towards the end (though the orchestral arrangements actually improve). This is the band I often highlight as one of the main reasons I have no time for Evanescence and hopefully The Silent Force will be listened to by enough to dispel the “orignality of Evanescence” myth. Sharon’s voice remains as gorgeous and powerful as ever. “Angels” strikes a personal chord for me, hence being my favourite song from the album, and the previous single, “Stand My Ground” is a great rockier second choice.
While ripping the album to my computer I also made my first submission to the FreeDB CD database. It’s a freely available source of CD track information which is supported by a host of programs including the Nero burning software and Audiograbber, which is still the best CD ripping program around when combined with the LAME codec. This means you can pop in virtually any CD from your collection and click one button to send a request off to the database which will then provide full track information to the program in question. It covers compilation albums too and because its knowledge is based on its vast userbase, it holds thousands of obscure entries too. It was nice finally to be able to contribute since this album is a brand new release from a band a little out of the mainstream.
The Globalist is taking shape properly now. I think we’ve passed the halfway mark in finalising article layouts. The photospread is done which is the part I was dreading in terms of painstaking positioning and text wrapping. Steph and I have been keeping each other going and make a pretty good team. A huge thanks to Lucille at Make Poverty History who secured us rights to use the photograph I wanted to use for the front cover (see early design). Yes, the first magazine I ever produce will have Fearne Cotton emblazoned on the cover! It should be suitably eyecatching methinks…
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