I didn’t really notice last week what with all the despair, but music is turning around! After my complaints about the early ’00s, things are getting back to where I like it: Extremely metal. That’s…

At 54 years old, and 26 years after his most famous band’s debut, guitarist Tom Morello is releasing The Atlas Underground, an album of collaborations with a variety of contemporary musicians. The Atlas Underground Tom…

Look, you guys, my heart’s really not in this. My beloved Oakland Athletics just lost the Wild Card game to the embodiment of the stodgy joylessness of baseball’s establishment. I’m in the throes of a…

It’s another edition of RIFF Rewind crowdsourced from the RIFF staff! Which means rock music was still overproduced and generic, and I couldn’t stand to slog through it. Look, I realize this may cause a…

Regular readers of this column may have noticed that I’ve included a song off every single Metallica studio album in the top five, and a song from every non-studio Metallica album in the Honorable Mentions.…

Well, it finally happened. After doing 35 of these columns I got to a year where I couldn’t find five songs for the list. There were three locks, and a couple under-appreciated deep cuts in…

We’re still in that dark time between album rock and YouTube. Record company executives had almost all the power to decide what we got to hear. Worse, what they decided we wanted to hear was…

SAN FRANCISCO — An Andrew W.K. concert is very much a hard rock show. The giant wall of amps at the back of the stage turned up loud enough that you can feel the bass line…

Ah, 2000. The first year of the 21st century or, if you’re a friendless pedant, the last year of the 20th. That storied year where we all asked who let the dogs out, then why…

Last fall, Andrew W.K. was in the process of returning to music for the first time in a decade with You’re Not Alone, his first album in a decade. When he finally went on tour, he…