Clockwise from top left: Aurora, Billy Strings, Honeyblood, Bon Iver, Sum-41, Tool, Opeth, 100 gecs, Subhumans and Lizzo. Welcome back to RIFF’s year-end album roundup! If you’re joining us just now, start with part one. Our album review staff is pretty musically diverse, which might explain why Opeth, Bon…

Tool performs at the Aftershock Festival on Oct. 13, 2019. Courtesy of Aftershock. SACRAMENTO — Northern California’s annual hard rock festival, Aftershock, continued its upward trajectory as one of the premiere national events for heavy music. What began back in 2012 as a one-day and one-stage event has ballooned…

SACRAMENTO — Tool is an aberration in the modern music landscape. Every choice the L.A. band makes seems to counter conventional wisdom and trend. Many of the band’s songs cross the 10-minute mark with brooding instrumentals. A decade passed between albums. At concerts, enigmatic frontman Maynard James Keenan spends…

Tool has a distinct advantage of desaturation. The band established a sound beyond duplication, released a handful of well-received albums, and then went silent for 13 years. Fiercely progressive yet entrancingly visceral, the quartet played by its own rules since day one—which apparently extends into its album release schedule.…

Photo: Che Holts Usually this column is the top five songs of each year. Sometimes, in an especially good year, I bend that and make it the top 10. This week has nine. The reasons for this are threefold: First, the longlist has 23 songs on it and that’s…

  Kanye West performs at the SAP Center in San Jose on Nov. 17, 2016. Photo: Paige K. Parsons Goodbye, 2017. It was great knowing you! Not really. Actually, 2017 sucked … except for the music; the music was great! Hello, 2018. It’s time to look forward to what is to come…