by SHANE SINNOTT

KaZaA, probably the best known of the illegal music download platforms, is being relaunched. After figuring in a majority of RIAA lawsuits (the story usually goes like this: someone has a KaZaA shared folder with 200 Britney Spears, Metallica and Guns N’ Roses tracks, and then gets sued at $10,000 per by the RIAA, resulting in a ludicrous settlement), the service is going legit after effectively being shut down for past transgressions. It has one of the shittiest-sounding subscription models I’ve heard. You pay $19.98 a month to download as many tracks as you like, which a) you can’t put on a portable music player, and b) become unplayable as soon as you stop your subscription. Yay. Only in the U.S. for now, so you’ll have to wait a few months for your turn to be ripped off.

This week I kept noticing a lot of blog posts along the lines of “the new Pearl Jam song is better than I thought it would be,” so I went and got “The Fixer” (tinyurl.com/ljhu6s), the official first single from their upcoming album, their first in forever, called Backspacer. It’s three minutes long and decidedly underwrought, which are points in Pearl Jam’s favour right there—like a tamed “Spin the Black Circle” from Vitalogy. Not great, but better than expected, it’s true. Coincidentally (or not), Alice in Chains (another band from the era, kids) is reforming as well, though under the bolder conditions of having a new frontman, their old one, Layne Staley, having died of his overuse of heroin. The album is Black Gives Way to Blue, and the single, “A Looking in View,” is at tinyurl.com/n5czs3. The song sounds as if the last 15 years never happened, which seems to be a trend these days (looking at you, Dinosaur Jr.).

As for bands that still mean something today, the Flaming Lips have a new album out in the fall called Embryonic, and if you’re cool, you’ll pretend to understand one of the first—surprise, it’s weird!—tracks floating around, “Silver Trembling Hands!” (tinyurl.com/nwf27a).