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Rediscovering The Chameleons

The clean, clickable interface of TuneGlue delves into Last.fm to find relationships between bands, which may reveal new music you may like, or a band you've forgotten over the years. TuneGlue pulls its music data out of Last.fm and presents it onscreen as a clickable node.

Enter the name of a band into the search field, and it appears as a spot. Clicking the spot opens a menu of choices, including Releases and Expand. The other two options lock the node in place, or delete it.

The Releases choice retrieves the top ten search results from Amazon.com's Music section. To be direct, Amazon's search needs a red-hot tweaking for better relevance. Someone get Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos in a room or something.

I searched for The Cure to start things off, and its list of ten releases came up accurate, wrapping up with the craggy-faced man on the cover of Staring At The Sea - The Singles. Gotta dig that one out of the well-beaten CD case.

The Expand feature defaults to showing six related artists to the node. No quibbles here - if it hadn't pulled up Siouxsie and The Banshees, The Sisters of Mercy, and New Order, I'd question the sanity of the universe.

New Order led to Echo & The Bunnymen, and from there to The Church, where I found Amazon's search needed work. The top two results were for a hymnal and Vivaldi's Gloria, before the band that did Reptile and Under The Milky Way appeared. Charlotte Church also popped up in the list, but The Church's 'Starfish' eluded TuneGlue's grasp.

Another path led from Echo & The Bunnymen to a Manchester band I hadn't thought of in years - The Chameleons. While discovery represents what TuneGlue does, rediscovery works well too.

Music fans should appreciate the trips down memory lane or into new territory from TuneGlue. It's an interesting approach to viewing what would normally be a list of search results on Amazon's pages, and as TuneGlue lacks that clutter, it's a recommended visit.