These are my top ten eleven in two instalments. Dave Alvin is pretty clearly number one. Rest much of a muchness. I'll do another post or two with the other music I enjoyed most this year.

Dave Alvin -- Eleven Eleven
This record is on the short road to being one of those where I can say I know every word to every song. Perfect balance of styles and a host of memorable characters, sketched in bluesy economy, brought to life by Dave's rumbling baritone and propelled by many a memorable lick. Here's one of my favourite songs, "Johnny Ace is Dead."

Gillian Welch -- The Harrow & The Harvest
Do I need to explain? No? Super.

JuJu -- In Trance
JuJu is Justin Adams and Judeh Camara who play the electric guitar and the Gambian ritti (one string violin) respectively. Their previous album made my Favourites list last year, and their albums will I suspect keep making the list as long as they do them. It is approaching banal these days to talk about the connections between western rock n roll via the blues and African genres, but just sticking the two traditions together is not guaranteed to produce anything interesting. These guys make it work perfectly.

The Bo-Keys -- Got to Get Back
Memphis funk super group (including the only survivor of the plane crash that took Otis Redding). Just what it says on the box.

Frank Turner -- England Keep My Bones
Well now. I had never heard of this bloke until someone included him on an early Best Of list back in November and now here we are. A punkier Billy Bragg? A more sarcastic Springsteen? Well, whatever I like every song on this album. I like the hookyness of every track, I like the acapella ditties about 1066, I like the atheist singalongs, I like the name checking of Johnny, Dylan, Jerry Lee and Dostoyevsky.

Zoe Muth and the Lost High Rollers -- Starlight Hotel
Do I need to talk about the attitude, the voice, the band and the lyrics? Or do I just need to say that it has a song on it called "If I Can't Trust You With a Quarter (How Can I Trust You With My Heart?)"

I did the BBC's How Musical Are You? test which confirms what I (and everyone who has tried to teach me music from the Year 2 teacher who wouldn't let me join the choir onwards) knew anyway; I love it but really, really, really suck at it. PITCH SCMITCH!

"We may be tone deaf, but we have the music." I think Leonard Cohen said that.

So Rogue's Gallery - Hal Wilner's star-studded sea shanties thing - at the Sydney festival is getting bagged from all quarters (lots of unhappy commenters there) which I can't say surprises me. The whole event had "underwhelming" written all over it from the start.

I did mildly enjoy the Leonard Cohen tribute a few years back, a Wilner and friends love-in along the same lines, but the concept does lend itself to self-indulgence and complacency. I thought this event offered all the pitfalls of Came So Far for Beauty (acts not learning the songs, lack of rehearsal etc) but with the added variables of uncertainty about outside acoustics, the weather and ambient noise of one of the country's busiest commuter and tourist hubs. The Opera House forecourt should be left to Australian Idol finales and triathlon finishing lines.

Despite Marianne Faithfull being singled out for a shellacking I'm still very excited about her solo show, it's hard to judge whether I would've felt so hostile to her performance. i don't really mind divas getting drunk and slurring out of tune, really, in fact I quite like it. I'll be sure to let you know Wednesday night.

I hate moving. Biggest argument in favour of moving entirely to digital, if you ask me.

Managed to empty the bath of CDs (thanks Mum) but re-sorting them in my prefered system awaits.

I think, historically speaking, this was written about Los Angeles but whatever it's such a ripper performance ...

So after the intial bafflement I got over the eMusic plan changes and was going to hang around, and make a conscious effort to channel the higher per track payments to labels/artists I wanted to support. But then a bigger problem came down the pipe: "in the near future" access to eMusic will be blocked entirely for users outside the USA. Canada, UK and EU. Entirely! Certain labels/albums are already unavailable on a country by country basis. This is a familiar message:

But this change would exclude us entirely.

And so eMusic joins Amazon MP3, Rhapsody, Napster, Lala, Spotify and countless other digital download and streaming services off-limits to us. Now, eMusic do say that exisiting customers will be "grandfathered in" (see FAQ) although of course that's what they said about my current subscription plan, which they just changed. And the grandfathering actually annoys me more, because it suggests the geographic restrictions are not enforceable law, but a voluntary policy decision in deference to their new BFFs at Sony, and future majors they hope to land. If you are doing something illegal and are a company, you don't say "oh well, "in the near future" we will stop doing illegal stuff but people already doing illegal stuff can keep on doing it."

I can go to Amazon.com right now and buy any CD I want and ship it here. But I cannot buy the same album in digital form from the Amazon MP3 Store. How does this make any sort of sense?

I have questions about it logged with customer service, i doubt I'll get a decent answer. Googling the issue of geographic distribution doesn't bring much helpful up.

So now I'm thinking I will just quit eMusic altogether because of it even though I would be grandfathered in, the whole thing leaves such a bitter taste in my mouth. It is no different than DRM to me, right now. What was the point of being so visionary and courageous over DRM for so long, only to capitualte in 2009 with rubbish like this? Should've slapped DRM on the tracks back in '02 and you could've had Sony then.

I see that Sony Australia has its own digital download store, called with a rather hilarious lack of irony bandit.fm. There are some positives about it at first glance, I can actually use it on a Mac, no-DRM MP3s and 320kps (although I'm fine with lower bitrates.) The content appears to be more than Sony stuff, the Blue Note label is there and that's owned by EMI. The artist and genre pages are attractively presented and easy to navigate.

However. I put in the last 10 or so albums I dl'd from eMusic and they had none of them. They had a few of the artists, but not the same albums. I conclude they have no independent labels at all. If someone did an album for Chess it's there because the Chess catalogue is now owned by Universal, but later, say, Alligator recordings by same artist are absent. They are more expensive than iTunes on some albums, and iTunes has a much bigger selection. And for a couple of them I know for a fact I can go to JB Hi Fi today and buy the hard copy cheaper.

Is this where Sony is hoping to channel my money by excluding me from eMusic? Tell 'em they're dreaming.

I have never seen Blues Brothers.

Segue:

Here is my latest 8tracks, a semi-late Friday night and RIP Koko eight songs which clocks in at just over 30 minutes. There are a few mournful eMusic references tucked away in the lyrics too. ;-(

Via the eMusic radio show, I heard the awesomely named Lucille Bogan's (aka Bessie Jackson) "Shave 'Em Dry" which somewhat stopped me whatever long weekend pottering I was doing at the time. Of course sexual references are everywhere in this pre-war stuff, no shock there but ... yoiks. Naturally it was not officially released and I couldn't google up corroboration for the claim in the comments at 17 Dots that its the first F word on record but its 1935 so it seems plausible. I was shocked, shocked I say. So shocked, I immediately downloaded the three alternate versions they have on eMu.

NSFW, NSF kiddies and NSF anyone who doesn't want to hear some vintage backroom jook joint 3am pr0n. Although it's very scratchy so you have to listen close, very close, to pick up the most scandalous parts. Maybe you have to listen to it very loud on repeat. *cough*

Did I ... hear tell someone tell a lie?

I beg forgiveness dear reader for having to mention Coldplay on this fine blog, but I would like to do so in correcting some misonceptions of an alleged music journalist.

It was on ABC's PM radio show on Wednesday night. SMH journo Bruce Elder had this to say about the Joe Satriani/Coldplay plagiarism case:

"It is almost that it is almost impossible to define what constitutes plagiarism in music, particularly in popular music because there are so many songs that are very similar. I mean all you have to do is listen to a very old classic which is the Archies' Sugar, Sugar and I believe that the chord progression in Sugar, Sugar has been used in something like 20 or 30 other pop songs."

The 12 bar blues is one of the most widely used chord progressions in music history. Yet no-one bothers fighting a plagiarism case over using it (and not just because establishing the origins of the progression would be almost impossible) because it is not the chord progression that gets people into trouble for music plagiarism cases. It is the melody. Elder would known that if he would have done some simple research. UK guitarist Garry Moore recently was busted because a guitar solo of his was very similar to a German pop song. And then there is the case of George Harrison and My Sweet Lord.

Of course, bands do copy their influences. But that is a different kettle of fish. The copying of influence tends to relate to more intagible elements such as style and sound.

So Elder has it wrong but that does not mean Satriani has a case. But to my ears, there is a definite similarity in the melody and it will be an interesting case to follow if it gets to the courts.

Amanda's note: There is a audio-visual comparison of the two songs here.

Leonard Cohen ticket buying expedition FAIL.

The latest innertubes sensation! Started here, went a million places, Phineas sent it to me and now I give it to you:

"Jesus is My Friend" by Sonseed. Quite ... something.

The "Search for Sonseed" entries are worth a rainy Tuesday gander.

I volunteered to roadtest the new beta 8tracks uploader and it's the bees knees. So simple is it, I knocked up three playlists just now to try it out. You can listen embedded here or go to the page at 8tracks by clicking the titles.

Classic(ish) country:

Merle Haggard; Donnie Fritts; Waylon Jennings; Robbie Fulks; Lynn Anderson; Loretta Lynn; Daryle Singletary; Moot Davis; Merle Haggard & George Jones; Jerry Lee Lewis; Johnny Cash; Dwight Yoakam; New Riders of the Purple Sage, Faron Young.
Old Time Gospel:

Indian Bottom Association; Washington Phillips; Wynona Carr; Sam Cooke; Carrie Smith; Horton Barker; Old Regular Baptists; Sister Rosetta Tharpe; Rev. F. W McGee; Rev. Sister Mary Nelson; Mavis Staples.

Soul Jazz (mostly):

Babatunde Lea; Spanky Wilson and the Quantic Soul Orchestra; Jazz Co-Op; Shirley Scott; David Murray Black Saint Quartet w/ Cassandra Wilson; Cannonball Adderley; Jimmy McGriff & Groove Holmes; Sun Ra; Marlena Shaw; Ray Brown Trio; King Curtis; Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis;Robert Rodriguez, Ed Calle And Steve Turre.

So I discovered that searching YouTube for "indian bottom" turns up a whole lot of ... things. What I was really looking for was something with the Indian Bottom Association of the Old Regular Baptist church whose odd, haunting, awesome, creepy, mermerising acapella "lined-out hymnody" I have lately discovered. This snippet is pretty much all I could come up with:

I heard them first on the Smithsonian Folkways comp I got last month, and further explored with the full CDs. I was somewhat ... er, surprised to learn these were not field recordings from 1948 but specially arranged sessions from 1997. As ever I can only commend the downloadable liner notes of both volumes at the SF website which include extensive detail about the church and music.

Bonus Equal Time! Also listening to: Atheist hip-hop.