The best albums of 2021 include Bleachers, My Morning Jacket, Ryley Walker, ZHU, Diana Ross, Made Kuti and Femi Kuti, Allison Russell, Chris Pierce, Hand Habits, Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney, Weezer, Amy Shark and Heartless Bastards. Welcome back to RIFF’s year-end album roundup! If you’re joining us…

Bleachers perform at The Masonic in San Francisco on Oct. 16, 2021. Steve Carlson/STAFF. SAN FRANCISCO — Jack Antonoff is a huge star now, thanks to his contributions to the music of other stars—deservedly so. As a happy side effect, his band Bleachers is now drawing much larger crowds…

While Jack Antonoff may be best known as a music producer and songwriter, helping pump out hits for the likes of Taylor Swift, St. Vincent, Clairo and many others, he’s no slouch when it comes to making music of his own. The 37-year-old New Jersey native has been a…

Photos: Chloe Catajan, Martin Lacey and courtesy NAPA — The Killers turned the heat up in Napa on the second day of BottleRock Napa Valley Saturday. The Las Vegas band may not have been responsible for the noticeable increase in sunshine, but it brought the glitz and glamor to its…

  Photo: Jay Demetillo This is the second in a three-part series. Read the introduction to learn how I’m scoring my list and find out about my “special consideration” in PART 1. Favorite Shows 2016 | Favorite Shows 2015 | Favorite Shows 2014 Favorite Shows 2013 | Favorite Shows 2012 11 – CATHEDRALS at the Mezzanine – June…

Photos: Alessio Neri OAKLAND — If the story that Jack Antonoff told at his band Bleachers‘ concert at the Fox Theater was remotely accurate, the stars of the show were not the band members—though Antonoff, his two drummers and two multi-instrumentalists performed memorably—but their crew of sound techs, managers…

The Who performs at Golden Gate Park at Outside Lands on Aug, 13, 2017. Photos: Alessio Neri SAN FRANCISCO —The weather forecast was calling for Sunday to be the one sunny day at Outside Lands in Golden Gate Park. But by the time headliners The Who took the stage,…

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 time to sort through all that? RIFF does! We’ve pooled our resources to find some of…

Charli XCX performs at the Fox Theater in Oakland on July 23, 2015. Roman Gokhman/STAFF. Perhaps the point Charlotte Aitchison was trying to make at the Fox Theater in Oakland Thursday evening was one of irony–-combining grrl power anthems with faux pole dancing and flashing of the lower half…

Bleachers perform at the Independent in San Francisco on Nov. 6, 2014. Roman Gokhman/STAFF. Bleachers‘ performance was solid throughout, but it was at the midpoint, somewhere near a cover of Tom Petty’s “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” that Jack Antonoff, who spoke about nursing a cold and having…