Clockwise from top left: Ethel Cain, Balmorhea, Shaun Ross, The Parrots, Tom McGuire & The Brassholes, and Sorry. Let RIFF pick your playlist! This week’s highlights include a gleefully creepy Midwestern gothic tune by Ethel Cain, Balmorhea’s beautifully hypnotic sound and Sorry’s two-minute smoke break. *** Sorry, “Cigarette Packet” — At only…

Film stills from “Quadrophenia” (left) and “Northern Soul.” I might as well kick off this occasional series on music and the movies with a claim bound to annoy someone: Despite the status of 1979’s “Quadrophenia” as the classic film about the English mod scene, 2014’s “Northern Soul” is an…

Clockwise from top left: Soft Glas, Arlo Parks, Michael Feuerstack, Night Beats, Juan Wauters and Q. Every week, there’s a plethora of new music at our fingertips. Artists on platforms like Spotify and Bandcamp are plentiful, and the radio offers a steady deluge of new singles, but who has…

Lost Themes III: Alive After Death is the third in a series of what you might call John Carpenter soundtracks to the films he never made. After decades of scoring his own movies, giving him a rare kind of control over the ambience and tone of his films, Carpenter…

Viagra Boys play off a European stereotype that hardly exists in the U.S.: dirtbag leftist spongers on the social welfare system who live a bohemian life, making self-indulgent art, taking drugs and getting drunk in well-funded public parks. If that sounds utopian by our standards, well it kind of…

If only we could all have such a creative incubation as John Dwyer and company during the pandemic. Osees (or Thee Oh Sees, Oh Sees or OCS) have released three albums this year, with Panther Rotate being the third. The usual energy the band puts into touring and traveling…

Thundercat performs at 1015 Folsom in San Francisco on Dec. 20, 2018. Photos: Shawn Robbins. SAN FRANCISCO — The mighty Thundercat, the virtuoso bassist and bandleader known for collaborations with Kendrick Lamar and Flying Lotus, led his trio in a blistering live performance at 1015 Folsom Thursday. Touring in support…

In the late ’90s, word about Dr. Octagon was passed from person to person, on burned CDs and dubbed tapes. He was a larger-than-life cult figure, with a following of hip-hoppers and punks alike. He was a new Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, a new Captain Beefheart; an avant-garde rapper whose…

Photos: Jane Hu SAN FRANCISCO — Bay Area favorite Geographer‘s Noise Pop show Thursday at The Independent was a glimpse of an artist in movement: Experimenting and changing, yet confident of his own skills and fully in command of his voice. Mike Deni has one of the best rock…

Some members of the audience at Ariel Pink’s concert at the Chapel had a seething reaction to what they percieved as overbearing, harassing and abusive onstage behavior directed by Pink toward back-up singer Charlotte Lindén Ercoli, who is also Pink’s partner. Ercoli was reportedly grabbed and pinned to the stage at times. A few…