“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…

Rachel Goodman’s top alt-rock and alt-pop songs of 2021. L to R; Row 1: Paul McCartney and Phoebe Bridgers; Maxïmo Park; Kings of Leon; Black Country, New Road; Wet Leg, The War on Drugs. Row 2: BC Camplight, Cannons, Strand of Oaks, Hovvdy, Ladyhawke, Fences, Sea Wolf, Courtney Barnett.…

The best albums of 2021 include Wale, Torres, Eric Church, serpentwithfeet, Mdou Moctar, Valerie June, Danny Elfman, Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth, Japanese Breakfast and Mastodon. Best of 202 Whew, we’ve almost made it halfway through our list of the best albums of 2021. This year may have felt…

Ever thought about using paprika, a spice from central Mexico that spread to Europe during the 1500s, to describe someone who is the center of attention in a pop song? If not, then check out the opening track to Japanese Breakfast’s newest album, Jubilee. In this song, the South Korean…

Belle and Sebastian perform at The Fox Theater in Oakland on June 25, 2018. Joaquin Cabello/STAFF. OAKLAND — Belle and Sebastian had the crowd dancing Monday at the Fox Theater. The Scottish outfit, led by frontman Stuart Murdoch, brought tons of energy and made the most of its visit to…

Photos: Paige K. Parsons SAN FRANCISCO — With some artists, what you hear on the album is what you hear in concert. It’s either because their songs are written to be played live or because it just works for both; there’s little difference between the two. Others, however, rearrange…

Welcome, to my five-part series counting down what I believe to be the 50 best albums of 2017. I listened to an insane amount of new music during my first year as a staff writer with RIFF, nearly 150 album releases, in fact. With that in mind, when narrowing down all…

Brief, sugared and lustrous, yet heartrendingly mournful, Michelle Zauner’s Psychopomp — a tribute to her late mother, was a surprisingly sublime debut. Under the moniker Japanese Breakfast, Zauner follows up her 2016 sleeper success with a more experimental project, Soft Sounds From Another Planet. Soft Sounds From Another Planet Japanese Breakfast…

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…