Joseph Menn, writing at Reuters:
Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company complied with a classified U.S. government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.
Mae are releasing their three EPs from 2009 on a 3xLP set. Pre-orders will go up today at 12:00pm PDT.
Throughout most of the new Ceres album, Drag It Down on You, vocalist Tom Lanyon sounds pissed. Not pissed in the way that The Story So Far’s Parker Cannon sounds pissed, not the kind of pissed that makes you want to punch your bedroom wall, but the kind of pissed that makes you want to punch yourself. See, Lanyon and the rest of Ceres have done a lot of growing up since 2014’s remarkable debut, I Don’t Want to Be Anywhere But Here, and the result of that growth is the band’s sophomore album, which will go down as one of the best albums in an absolutely stacked year.
I had the chance to do some video interviews with a bunch of bands at this year’s Riot Fest. I’ll be breaking these down into two posts, but here’s the first batch:
Emmet Byrne interviewed Eric Timothy Carlson, the artist behind Bon Iver’s latest album, 22, a Million:
In the following interview we present the finished artwork, supplemented with process work and related materials. Eric takes us down the rabbit hole, describing the intense, fluid work sessions with Justin Vernon and others at the Eau Claire studios, the numbers that permeate the track list, the influence of digital culture on the new album, the prevalence of cryptic symbolism throughout the Minneapolis/Wisconsin music scene, and the Packers.
The Decemberists have posted up a board game on Kickstarter. The game was designed along with illustrator Carson Ellis and game designer Keith Baker. It’s called Illimat and there are a whole lot of options for purchase.
Eric Choi has parted ways with We Came As Romans.
Kanye West postponed a pair of Saint Pablo tour dates following the incident involving Kim Kardashian in Paris. “Due to family concerns, this week’s Philadelphia and Detroit dates on the Saint Pablo Tour have been rescheduled,” Live Nation said in a statement. “The Philadelphia show will take place on December 13 and the Detroit show on December 22.” The Saint Pablo tour will resume its scheduled route on October 7th in Chicago.
Sum 41’s performance of “Fake My Own Death” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert can be watched below.
Tom DeLonge has released the new young adult novel Strange Times: The Ghost in the Girl. The full press release can be found below.
American Football have released their new song “Desire Gets in the Way.” You can stream it below.
Ben Stiller, writing on Medium:
I got diagnosed with prostate cancer Friday, June 13th, 2014. On September 17th of that year I got a test back telling me I was cancer free. The three months in between were a crazy roller coaster ride with which about 180,000 men a year in America can identify.
Balance and Composure have released a new video for “Afterparty.”
Ben Affleck revealed during a recent interview that his upcoming Batman film will probably be titled The Batman.
Read More “Ben Affleck’s Batman Movie to Be Called ‘The Batman’”
Between 2002 and 2009, Bruce Springsteen released five studio albums. Rather remarkably, that statistic made the aughts Springsteen’s most prolific decade ever. The Boss fired off four straight classics in the 1970s (Greetings from Asbury Park, The Wild, The Innocent, The E Street Shuffle, Born to Run, and Darkness on the Edge of Town) and put out four more in the 1980s (The River, Nebraska, Born in the U.S.A. and Tunnel of Love) before faltering in both quality and output in the 1990s. (The last decade of the millennium only saw Human Touch, Lucky Town, and The Ghost of Tom Joad, all of which are among Springsteen’s weakest LPs.)
The 2000s, though, brought the man back to life. Suddenly, Springsteen albums (and good ones) were a regular occurrence again. During the seven years that elapsed between 2002 and 2009, we got three E Street Band records (The Rising, Magic, and Working on a Dream), one acoustic album (Devils & Dust), and one tribute record (The Seeger Sessions). Four of those five records are worthwhile (Working on a Dream is the dud), and two are genuine classics (The Rising and Magic both recapture the…well, “magic” of the E Street Band’s golden age). However, there’s still an argument to be made that the three best Springsteen albums of the 2000s weren’t even written by Bruce, but by guys named Brandon, Craig, and Brian.