Author HR Huber-Rodriguez

Xiu Xiu, led by South Bay native and creative genius Jamie Stewart, are one of the most interesting, refreshing, consistently abrasive, and unpredictable bands this side of Death Grips. In some ways, they are t...

Vancouver garage rock duo Japandroids have made a name for themselves as the best guitar/drums act since the late White Stripes. Amassing heaps of critical praise following their 2009 commercial debut Post-Noth...

As the 2010s enter their eighth year, I’ve taken considerable time to reflect upon the decade’s most influential artists. Bands like Beach House came in strong, put out consistent LPs with only minor variat...

This past weekend I had a conversation with a former B-Side contributor about the merits of my favorite fruitless activity: compiling my coveted year-end albums list.  As someone who takes this pointless endea...

2016 is nearly over, and with the conclusion of the year come the myriad human attempts to quantitatively evaluate the last three-hundred sixty-five days through year-end and best-of lists and rankings.  Conti...

When you’ve been following the independent music scene for long enough, you start to see the same story-lines play out over and over again.  There’s the classic “first album was solid, got signed to a bi...

I stood in a crowd of about 20,000, waiting for the man who might very well go down as the best rapper of all time. Earlier that day, I had previously been harangued into seeing The Chainsmokers, and their bran...

It’s been a big year for rap. The four biggest rap stars of the moment- Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar, Drake and Chance the Rapper- all put out full length projects, and Young Thug has over the summer skyrockete...

Few bands have maintained the album to album consistency achieved over the last dozen years by Austin’s Okkervil River.  Fronted by Will Sheff - the band’s vocalist, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and ...

The enigmatic Frank Ocean rewrote the book on R&B with his landmark second album, 2012’s Channel Orange, and the anticipation surrounding his latest release has been bordering on sensational. Ultimately, ...

Last Friday (4/8) the Starline Social Club in Oakland played host to two of the best working songwriters in indie rock: New York’s Mitski and Philadelphia’s Japanese Breakfast. While the former is a rapidly...

Too often, single female musicians are lumped in with some amorphous singer-songwriter genre that encompasses any female vocalist with some combination of guitars, pianos, and strings sans band. Puberty 2, the ...

Multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird's music is so layered and lushly arranged that it’d be difficult to imagine his live renditions accurately representing his studio creations. But Bird makes excellent use of ...

Drake once said that by the time he turned 30, he planned to no longer be rapping. I remember feeling respect for this; he was an artist in his prime recognizing that aging artists rarely come close to their ca...

Asking the question ‘Is the album dead?’ has been at the heart of myriad think pieces written by professionals of the industry and amateur columnists alike. One facet of the traditional album that often get...