Review: Foo Fighters – Your Favorite Toy

Foo Fighters - Your Favorite Toy
Adam Grundy

The 12th studio album from Alt Rock legends Foo Fighters, called Your Favorite Toy, is a ten-track effort that was produced by the band and Oliver Roman. This marks the first time Foo Fighters have gone outside of longtime producer/collaborator Greg Kurstin since 2014’s Sonic Highways, and in retrospect that was a bit of a risk on Dave Grohl and his bandmates’ part. Your Favorite Toy sounds like a big rock record, was recorded in Grohl’s home studio in Los Angeles, and yet when you wrap your ears around the LP you can’t help but feel like it’s not up to the same quality of the band’s most recent output. It’s the first Foo Fighters record to have Ilan Rubin (Paramore, NIN, Angels & Airwaves) behind the kit, and he does a commendable (if not the near-impossible) job of filling in for the late Taylor Hawkins. Some of the singles, like “Caught in the Echo” and lead single of “Asking For a Friend”, feel like a blend between what Foo Fighters have done on key albums like Wasting Light and One By One, while the other material that surrounds these key songs could have used a little more fine-tuning.

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The “Green Era” Blossoms During The Maine’s D.C. Concert at the 9:30 Club

Video
Adam Grundy

If there’s one thing you can say about The Maine, it’s that they know how to put together a great show from top to bottom. During the concert I attended in Washington, D.C. at the legendary 9:30 Club, The Maine’s first headlining tour in nearly 2 years, the experience was incredible. The energy in the crowd was fairly consistent from the time Broadside took the stage, things kept moving during Grayscale, and the audience vibed with the synth rock of Nightly. The Maine proved they belonged on top of the billing, and possibly the world, with a career-spanning set of 22 songs that had at least one track from each of the band’s ten studio albums.

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How Does Shazam Work?

Apps
Jason Tate

Shri Khalpada breaking down how Shazam works:

Computers can flip the script. Instead of asking ”which song matches this sequence of sounds?”, the phone asks ”for each of these sounds, which songs contain them?” for each hash in the clip. It’s the same idea as the index at the back of a book: rather than re-reading every page to find a word, you jump to the word’s entry and see every page it lives on. 

This essentially makes the lookup operation O(1)O(1), meaning it takes roughly the same amount of time whether you have 100 songs or 100 million. More precisely, the phone goes straight to each hash’s address rather than scanning through songs, and the number of possible hashes is large enough that each address only contains a handful of entries, even across millions of songs.

Director of Slam Dunk Festival Steps Down in Wake of Accusations

Festival
Jason Tate

The director of the Slam Dunk festival has stepped down after being accused of sexual assault.

A statement released by the festival says he “strongly refutes” the claims but adds that he has stepped down from his role.

The full Slam Dunk statement reads: “We are aware of allegations published yesterday relating to one of our directors. We take these allegations seriously and understand that they may be distressing and hard to process for our community.