Jack White, “Fear of Dawn.” Jack White is a little like Madonna. The iconoclastic rock musician is a stylistic chameleon whose look and sound have evolved over the his 20-year run in the spotlight. But White’s latest album, Fear of the Dawn, makes it clear that if his eccentric…

Journey performs at Chase Center in San Francisco on March 31, 2022. Sean Liming/STAFF. SAN FRANCISCO — With more than a hundred years of cumulative shredding between them, guitarists Steve Lukather and Neal Schon brought their legendary bands Toto and Journey to Chase Center Thursday for some frenetic fretwork. The blistering…

Weezer, “SZNZ: Spring.” Here we are in 2022: the pandemic drags on, war rages in Europe, the rich tapestry of human civilization frays with economic upheaval… what’s Weezer up to? Glad you asked. Rivers Cuomo and company have challenged themselves to put out four seasonally themed albums in a…

Sonic Youth, “In/Out/In.” My parents divorced when I was 7. The separation not only meant spending every other weekend with my dad and his new girlfriend; the fracturing of my family made me skeptical that any love could survive the perils of modern life. For a time in my…

Loop, “Sonancy.” Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume once wrote, “Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind which contemplates it.” In the 1980s, Loop, the psychedelic British, proto-shoegaze outfit, put Hume’s notion to the test, blending the overdriven power chords of The Stooges…

Mark Lanegan of the Screaming Trees and Queens Of The Stone Age performs at Koko in London on June 22, 2017. Photo by Alberto Pezzali/NurPhoto. Mark Lanegan died at his home in Killarney, Ireland on Tuesday. As vocalist for The Screaming Trees, Lanegan was part of the grunge explosion…

“Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono.” I’m convinced one of the reasons the aliens refuse to make contact is our species’ hot takes about Yoko Ono. Any sufficiently advanced civilization would certainly appreciate Ono’s boundary-breaking work, and the fact that she’s blamed for everything from the breakup of the…

If God had wanted more face-melting flute solos in the world of rock and roll, he would have made more than one Ian Anderson. The singular presence of Jethro Tull‘s visionary flautist and frontman suggests the universe is content to have the flute remain one of the rarest spices…

Don Wilson of The Ventures performs during the 23rd Annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City on March 10, 2008. Photo by Kevin Kane/WireImage. Don Wilson, who founded the influential surf rock group The Ventures in the late 195os,…

Much like the poet Walt Whitman, the blues contains multitudes. Seemingly a genre dedicated to searing guitar solos and feedback-drenched suffering, the blues also spans gentler acoustic moods. American bluesman Keb’ Mo’ (born Kevin Roosevelt Moore) has made this mellower branch of the blues family tree his home for…