DudeAsInCool

Today, Lindsey Buckingham releases his new self-titled album, his first solo album in a decade — and his first since being kicked out of Fleetwood Mac and all of the ensuing drama. Last night, he went on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to celebrate the release, where he played “On The Wrong Side,” which is just one of the LP’s shockingly good early singles. Watch Buckingham’s performance of the propulsive folk-rocker, complete with transcendent vocal harmonies and ripping guitar solos, below. View the full article

Bertrand Goldberg is best known as an architect, but those with more robust understanding of his work refer to him as a “design scientist.” After several years of training at the Cambridge School of Landscape Architecture and the Bauhaus in Berlin between World Wars, Goldberg returned to his native Chicago and quickly made a name for himself. His first big coup, dating to 1938, was a line of shops for the North Pole ice cream chain that could be easily disassembled and transported to alternate locations. From there he went on to design plywood boxcars, prefab housing units, rear-engine automobiles, innovative furniture, even mobile vaccine laboratories. But the crown jewel of his career was Marina City. View the full article

This past week, Grime attended the Met Gala, rocking a Dune-inspired look that included a sleek facemask, a “secret book,” and a gigantic sword. Credit where it’s due: She looked cool as hell. While she was getting ready for the big to-do, Grimes also did a Vogue video interview where she talked about the forthcoming follow-up to her 2020 album Miss Anthropocene. Grimes has already said a lot about the as-yet-untitled new LP, which will supposedly be a space opera about a lesbian artificial intelligence. She’s also teased clips of new songs on Discord and TikTok. In that Vogue interview, she makes some grand pronouncements about it. View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Austin Distel) SushiSwap's chief technology officer says the company's MISO platform has been hit by a software supply chain attack. SushiSwap is a community-driven decentralized finance (DeFi) platform that lets users swap, earn, lend, borrow, and leverage cryptocurrency assets all from one place. Launched earlier this year, Sushi's newest offering, Minimal Initial SushiSwap Offering (MISO), is a token launchpad that lets projects launch their own tokens on the Sushi network. Unlike cryptocurrency coins that need a native blockchain and substantive groundwork, DeFi tokens are an easier alternative to implement, as they can function on an existing blockchain. For example, anybody can create their own "digital tokens" on top of the Ethereum blockchain without having to recreate a new cryptocurrency altogether. Attacker steals $3 million in Ethereum via one GitHub commit In a Twitter thread today, SushiSwap CTO Joseph Delong announced that an auction on MISO launchpad had been hijacked via a supply chain attack. An "anonymous contractor" with the GitHub handle AristoK3 and access to the project's code repository had pushed a malicious code commit that was distributed on the platform's front-end. Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Dell's XPS 15 9510. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ] Most people buying a laptop these days will get by just fine with a 13- or 14-inch thin-and-light PC like the Dell XPS 13 or Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon. These laptops have reasonably powerful processors and integrated graphics that are good enough for an external monitor or two, but they prioritize a thin profile and light weight over performance. Still, sometimes you need something larger and more powerful, whether it’s because you want a bigger screen to use away from your desk or you need extra processor cores or graphical power for editing videos or playing games. And if you want those things in a laptop that doesn’t totally disregard size and weight—and if you prefer or require Windows instead of macOS—that’s when you buy something like the XPS 15. The latest XPS 15 (officially, model number 9510) is yet another iterative improvement for a laptop that has always looked and felt like a blown-up version of the XPS 13. But six- or eight-core Intel Tiger Lake processors and a new Nvidia GeForce RTX GPUs with ray tracing capabilities make this version of the XPS 15 especially appealing for professionals and light gamers, even if updated competitors like Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 (and, when it’s finally released, an updated version of the 16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon) give it a run for its money. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Right now, Taylor Swift is undertaking the vast project of re-recording all of her old albums — partly as a way to re-examine those old songs but mostly as a grand fuck-you to Scooter Braun, the man who bought her master recordings. Swift released her new version of 2008’s Fearless back in April, and she’s said that she’ll release her new take on 2012’s Red in November. That new version will include a lot of bonus tracks, and Swift will have help from some big stars. But today, Swift released a new Taylor’s Version, and it’s not a take of one of the songs from Red. Instead, she’s re-constructed “Wildest Dreams,” the great single from her hugely popular 2014 album 1989. View the full article

In 2015, Nick Cave’s son Arthur fell from a cliff near Brighton and died. Arthur was 15. Since then, a great deal of Nick Cave’s work has revolved, quite understandably, around grief. Cave and the Bad Seeds’ deeply powerful 2019 album Ghosteen, in particular, worked as a meditation on loss. And now Cave will further explore that grief in a new memoir called Faith, Hope & Carnage. View the full article

The immensely popular and divisive Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso — a warm-hearted sitcom that runs on good vibes rather than good jokes, in which Jason Sudeikis plays a relentlessly positive American football coach hired to coach a British football (soccer) team — is close to wrapping up its second season. Today Apple Music has released the soundtrack for that season. View the full article

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. View the full article

If you thought Taylor Hawkins was busy enough to do anything else besides what he’s done this year, well, guess again! Hawkins teamed up with Jane’s Addiction guitarist Dave Navarro and bassist Chris Chaney (who also played with Hawkins in Alanis Morissette’s band) to form NHC. According to a release, NHC formed in the past year, and needless to say, these guys know each other pretty well from over the years. NHC shared their first two songs, “Feed the Cruel” and “Better Move On,” which features Hawkins on lead vocals and drums, and you can hear them below. The trio will be making their live debut in two weeks at Eddie Vedder’s Ohana Encore weekend in Dana Point on October 2. The post Dave Navarro, Taylor Hawkins Form New Band NHC, Share Two Songs appeared first on SPIN. View the full article

Dave Navarro, Taylor Hawkins, and Chris Chaney have formed a new band called NHC. (Navarro, Hawkins, Chaney — get it?) The Los Angeles rockers, of course, have some history: both Navarro and Chaney are in Jane’s Addiction, and Chaney and Hawkins played together in Alanas Morissette’s touring band back in the day. Plus, Chaney has helped Hawkins out with his …And The Coattail Riders group. Suffice to say these dudes know each other. View the full article

Next week, the Hal Willner-organized album I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground & Nico is being released. On it, a whole lot of artists cover every song on the Velvet Underground’s 1967 debut. We’ve heard contributions from Iggy Pop and Matt Sweeney, Kurt Vile, Matt Berninger, and Courtney Barnett, and now — fresh off linking up with Angel Olsen to do their recent collab live at Pitchfork Music Fest — Sharon Van Etten is here with her rendition of “Femme Fatale.” Check it out below. View the full article

Toronto dance-punk duo Death From Above 1979 have covered Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” for Amazon Music. “We made a kind of witchy version of the song that would make Steve Perry magically join Journey again,” the band wrote on Twitter. If you’re an Amazon Music subscriber, you can check it out below. View the full article

The Sydney, Australia-based band Low Life have announced a new album, From Squats To Lots: The Agony And XTC Of Low Life, the follow-up to their 2019 album Downer Edn. Today, they’re releasing the album’s lead single, “Agony & XTC,” an energetic and pummeling scrawl. Check out a music video for the track below. View the full article

Joyce Manor played the opening night of Riot Fest in Chicago on Thursday night and they broke out a cover of My Chemical Romance’s Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge anthem “Helena.” Seems like a match made in heaven! View the full article

The 2020 iPhone SE. [credit: Samuel Axon ] Apple has quietly discontinued the largest storage configuration of the iPhone SE. Previously, the SE was available in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB variants. But the 256GB model is no longer available in Apple's online store. But don't take this to mean that the iPhone SE is going anywhere. In fact, analysts and journalists have published multiple similar reports claiming that the iPhone SE will get an upgrade early next year. The reports say that the 2022 iPhone SE will feature the Apple's A15 chip—the same one that's inside the newly announced iPhone 13, iPhone 13 Pro, and iPad mini. The phone would also feature 5G and have Qualcomm's X60 modem, according to Nikkei. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

A few weeks ago, the Hudson Valley band Soul Blind introduced their new EP Third Chain with its zoned-out title track, which channeled some serious ’90s grunge energy. There’s more where that came from on the other two tracks of the EP, “Misplaced” and “Phantom Pool,” both of which are out now. Expect disaffected vocals and monster riffs, buried in an appropriate amount of muck. View the full article

Columbus indie-pop Band To Watch Snarls are following up their 2020 debut Burst with What About Flowers?, a new EP recorded in Seattle and produced by former Death Cab For Cutie guitarist Chris Walla. “We had time to stew on this new aura our band has for this release. We have entirely new musical influences, and working with Chris Walla — that’s when it hit me that we’re in a band,” singer Chlo White says. View the full article

Transgressive reissued Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s pioneering 1986 album Keyboard Fantasies earlier this year. And now, the trans Canadian-American artist has announced Keyboard Fantasies Reimagined, a collection of remixes and covers featuring musicians like Bon Iver and Flock Of Dimes, Blood Orange, Arca, and Julia Holter. View the full article

Couplet is a new project from Tanner Jones, formerly of Florida emo heroes You Blew It!, plus Adam Beck and Evan Weiss of Into It. Over It. They’re billing it quite knowingly as a “synth pivot,” and yes, it does sound like Jones has traded out his guitars for keyboards. In fact, “Old Elba,” the new single out today, reminds me of the Postal Service, the ultimate sensitive-indie-guy-goes-synthpop project. View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft) New versions of Microsoft Office aren't as big a deal as they used to be, thanks to the continuously updated (and continuously paid-for) versions of the apps that come with a Microsoft 365 subscription. But for everyone else, there's still Office 2021, an upgrade to Office 2019 that's coming to both Windows and macOS on October 5, Microsoft announced today. Office 2021 will add the same features as the Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (or LTSC—catchy!) release, which is available today. Compared to Office 2019, the last "perpetual" version of Office, the new version includes Dark Mode support, support for version 1.3 of the OpenDocument format, new Excel functions and formulas, improved slide show recording for PowerPoint, and various user-interface tweaks and enhancements. Microsoft lists most of the new features here. The company plans to offer five years of "Mainstream Support" for Office 2021 without any extended support beyond that. The end date for Office 2021 support is in October of 2026, just a year after support ends for the Windows versions of Office 2016 and Office 2019. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Starting out in the early-’90s grunge scene, Candlebox lead singer Kevin Martin didn’t feel like a soon-to-be rock star. “I wasn’t living the lifestyle of the other Seattle musicians,” he tells me over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. “I wasn’t a bike messenger like [Pearl Jam’s] Jeff Ament was, and I didn’t work at a coffee shop like half the other musicians in Seattle did. I worked at a shoe store. Then I went and worked at a really nice shoe store and I had to wear suits and nice shoes and stuff.” View the full article

Next month, Nothing are releasing The Great Dismal B-Sides, which is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of tracks recorded during the sessions for the Philadelphia heavy-music-to-shoegaze band’s 2020 album The Great Dismal. Last month, they shared the new song “Amber Gambler.” Today, they’re sharing another track, a cover of the Delfonics’ 1968 soul classic “La-La (Means I Love You).” Frontman Domenic Palermo says: View the full article

A Project Taara transmitter. Google's parent company, Alphabet, is still experimenting with hooking up remote towns to the Internet via frickin' laser beams. Today, Alphabet's moonshot "X Lab" shared an update on Project Taara, its experimental point-to-point optical communication system, often described as "fiber optics without the fiber." The company built a working installation in Africa and has been blasting a 20Gbps link about 5 km across the Congo River to a town of millions of people, lowering the cost of Internet access for them. The Taara laser beam is bridging the gap between Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which are on opposite sides of the Congo River. Brazzaville has decent Internet, but because nobody wanted to run a fiber line through the world's deepest and second-fastest river, Kinshasa uses a fiber line that runs 400 km around the river, and the Internet is five times more expensive there. Alphabet's 20Gbps commercial link has been up and running for 20 days now, and the company says it has served nearly 700TB of data in that time, with 99.9 percent uptime. Taara was born out of the "Loon" Internet balloon project launched in 2017. Originally, Google was building flying cell towers to beam down the Internet from the sky (over RF), but for balloon-to-balloon backhaul, the company was planning communications via laser beam. Space X just started doing something similar by equipping its Starlink satellites with space lasers for optical intra-satellite communication. One benefit of Sky- and space-based laser communication is that not much can interfere with a point-to-point optical beam. Ground-based lasers have more interference to consider, since they have to deal with nearly everything: rain, fog, birds, and once, according to Alphabet's blog post, "a curious monkey." Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc. View the full article