I’ve been fooling around for the past week with a website called Let Them Sing It For You. It’s a Swedish website (part of a radio channel) that lets you feed a phrase, a sentence or just arbitrary words and then spews them out as a song. Only, to create the final song for you, the software seeks out each of the words that you fed from a database of popular songs. So, if you write the clichéd blues opening line: “I woke up this morning”, it’ll pull out “I” from, say, a Chris Isaak song, “woke” from maybe a Nickelback song and so on. The end product, depending on the words you’ve fed in, can either be a nice mashed up melody or utter rubbish.
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Take a stiff shot of the music of Lynyrd Skynyrd. Add some more grit, grime and edge. Shake it up well in an old cocktail-shaker and serve it straight up. What you’ll get is what a band called Drive-By Truckers serves up. I first came across the Truckers when I heard their two-CD epic, The Southern Rock Opera, released in 2001. A concept album that explores southern rock music, the album is themed on Lynyrd Skynyrd, the rock band that Ronnie Van Zant founded in 1965. Van Zant and two of his band members were killed in a plane crash in 1977 but not before Lynyrd Skynyrd garnered a huge following—even in India. On my infrequent visits to some Delhi bars I still hear their anthemic song, Free Bird, being played by DJs.
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Jazz legend Duke Ellington, who’s credited with many interesting quotes on jazz, blues and music critics is believed to have once said: “There are two kinds of music. Good music and the other kind.” But what’s good and what’s the other kind is entirely a matter of individual taste. Mentioning Ellington’s quote, a recent article in Uncut magazine said perhaps The Beatles are one those rare bands on whom there is a consensus. Everybody thinks The Beatles made great music.
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Ever since last week when I first heard Pearl Jam’s Backspacer, their newest album, I’ve been obsessively listening to it over and over again. It’s a mighty fine album and if you read the review in last Saturday’s Rock ’n’ Roll Circus in Hindustan Times by my colleague Indrajit Hazra you’ll know what I mean. Backspacer is a whopper; a cracker of an album from the band. Pearl Jam has been around for nearly 20 years, much longer than what many bands take to burn out or become their own stupid caricatures—I’m sure you know the ones I’m talking about.
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There were two reasons why I picked up an album a couple of weeks back and they had nothing to do with the music. The first, was the name of the band Dr. Fong & Friends. I liked that. The second, was the name of the album Beethoven of Da Blues. I liked that even more. Dr. Fong is the pseudonym of self-taught American blues musician, Jay Wilfong, and in reality he and his band play a brand of mean rock-infused blues, almost all of it original compositions.
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I know we’re barely into the tenth month this year and November and December are still left, but 2009 has thus far been such a hyperactive period for music that I couldn’t help writing about the best that I’ve heard till now. It’s not easy to do a list of the best new albums but let me try.

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Sometimes when the party is over, everyone has left, the empty glasses still stand about and I’m sleepy yet want to listen to one more album, it is Slanted & Enchanted that almost invariably comes out. Instead of on the audio system, increasingly these days, in deference to the others that I live with, it is cranked up on the iPod. I find Pavement’s first (and may I say, classic) album’s fractured music, esoteric lyrics and the entire low-fidelity quality of sound a perfect way to top off a night of excesses.
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Purists will hate me for it but I like covers. I know there’s nothing like the real McCoy but listening to cover versions of songs whose classic versions you’re familiar with has a different sort of appeal. I enjoy listening to covers, especially when they’re done in an unexpected way. In recent weeks there was quite a bit of that.
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What was otherwise a bland week turned into something special when I discovered that a brand new full-length album was available for download absolutely free. What’s more it was a totally legal download. The album, Dig Deep, by the band, The Motet, is up on various websites, including several mp3 blogs, and it made me revisit music by this mainly instrumental band who play their own brand of jazz, funk and afrobeat influenced music.

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The very first time I heard their lead singer’s raspy, nasal, serrated vocals, I knew I was going to like Deer Tick, a band I first heard on a podcast of their gig at Newport Folk Fest last month. I may have mentioned the band in passing in an earlier instalment of Download Central but I hadn’t explored them enough then. Lead singer John McCauley III’s nasal snarl belies his age. He is 23. And a friend who dropped in while I was playing some Deer Tick said he sounds like a baby Dylan.
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