Photos: Joaquin Cabello 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 the Bay Area. Belle and Sebastian arrived onstage to a backdrop of a…

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…