short thoughts

White Lies' BIG TV, released August 12th, tries to portrait the image of a he and a she leaving the provincial town and moving to the big city.

The album kicks off on high hopes with Big TV and, the first single, There goes our love again, continuing on a down spiral with Space I, First Time Caller and Mother Tongue, but in the end Getting Even, in my opinion the top song on this album, makes it all worth it. Change comes next, bringing a taste of The Price Of Love, from the band's debut album, To Lose My Life.

Moving on, the last 5 songs, in my opinion, don't have anything special, excepting maybe Tricky To Love and Goldmine, the latter putting up a good balance between rhythmic drums, background synthesizers and McVeigh's baritone voice.

My personal favorite online mapping service, MangoMap, has been updated to v2.0. Some of the improvements include:

- Data Editing: You can now edit your data in MangoMap. The simple interface allows you to easily update the geometry of your data (point/layer/polygon), their attributes, or even add new features. Edits can be viewed immediately in any maps based on that data.

- Data Access: There’s no point in being able to edit your data if you can’t download it again. You can now download all of your MangoMap datasets in Shapefile, KML (Google Maps & Google Earth) and CSV (Excel, Google Docs & Open Office) formats.

- Private Web Map Service (WMS): All accounts now have their own password protected WMS, which is a tiled map service. This means that you can now load your MangoMap layers into desktop GIS systems such as ArcGIS & QGIS or any other mapping system that supports the WMS standard.

- Data Management: The new data management panel makes it much easier to manage your maps and data. We also added the ability to delete datasets which was something we have been asked for a lot.

Unmistakable Babyshambles style!

Going to see Kaiser Chiefs in a couple of weeks. Hopefully they're gonna play some of their classic ones. Really eager to go since my last festival-experience was at B'estfest, in Bucharest, in 2009.

As for the Sziget's brother-festival, it's been a lot of hype because of the decision to move the festival from Targu Mures, home of Peninsula/Felsziget for the past 10 years, to Cluj-Napoca. 

The new album, released July 1st, brings a new sound to the band: heavier guitars and bass, classical instruments and backing vocals - on some tracks - a fresh addition to the new Editors.

Compared to the previous In This Light And On This Evening, a heavily synthesized and raw release, The Weight Of Your Love has a much stronger orientation towards musicality and lyric meaning.