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Bet you didn’t know Rage Against the Machine and Cake had a baby.
OK, that’s not true. Bands technically can’t have babies, but if they could, Flobots would be descended from those two bands.
Chances are decent that you’ve heard the band’s most recent single, “Handlebars.” If you haven’t, just wait; it’ll probably wind up on a HP commercial or something equally unfitting.
Flobots might ride without handlebars, but they also can make some statements about the life in this country, both good and bad, while hip-hopping their way through “Fight with Tools.”
Hip-hopping their way? Sheesh.
Anyway, “Rise” is the band’s next single, and while you likely won’t hear much more of the Flobots on mainstream radio, it’s a fun album that tries to rise above the mindless music that seems to be all too common lately.
- Curt Trnka | La Crosse Tribune
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Newly launched voicemail service MessageSling takes over your standard cell phone’s voicemail and replaces it with one you can control from the Web.
Once you’ve signed up and typed in a single forwarding string to activate your MessageSling mail, you can see your voicemails in a Gmail-style inbox, listen to them in an embedded player and label, archive and search them later.
The service promises voice-to-text translation in the near future, and you can get e-mails with MP3 messages or SMS alerts about new voicemails (useful if you’re the type to leave your phone on silent). MessageSling (www.messagesling.com) is free to use, with seemingly unlimited storage.
- Lifehacker.com
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Throughout his excellent private detective series and his superlative stand-alone mysteries, Dennis Lehane has explored how individuals become who they are.
This theme is also the bedrock of “The Given Day” (Morrow, $27.95), Lehane’s most ambitious novel.
While it retains some elements of crime fiction, “The Given Day” leaps into historical fiction with ease and grace, exploring the beginnings of the 20th century and culminating in the 1919 Boston Police Strike. Throughout the story, Lehane examines racism, xenophobia, workers’ rights, the economy, terrorism, religious repression, union violence, communism, politics and social change. But it never seems crammed with ideology and never loses sight of the story.
- Oline H. Cogdill | Sun Sentinel
