A diverse range of music to say the least tonight.

The Spazzys – Paco Doesn’t Love Me (demo)
Mick Harvey – Driven To Kenny
PJ Harvey – Highway 61 Revisited
Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited
Bob Dylan – Workingman’s Blues #2
Bobby Bare – The Long Black Veil
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – (I’ll Love You) Till The End of the World
Die Haut – Truck Love (feat Nick Cave)
Lisa Gerrard – In Exile
This Mortal Coil – Barramundi
This Mortal Coil – Dreams Made Flesh
Slug Fuckers – Deaf Disco
Pel Mel – Shoes Should Fit
Okapi Guitars – No More Secrets
Rhythmx Chymx – The Now Generation
Severed Heads – Lamborghini
Severed Heads – Phantasised Persecutory Breast
Bradbury – Rhode Island Slut (A Type of Chicken)
Severed Heads – Your Kydneys remixed
New Waver – Monday Morning’s All Right For Working
Al Duvall – Bury Me In Shellac
Singing Sadie – Put Down The Carvin g Knife
Naked On The Vague – All Aboard!
Justice Yeldham – 261005 Hamar, Norway
Justice – Let There Be Light

Mudd Up!‘s moved. Jace Clayton, or DJ/Rupture if you prefer, trimmed his address of the unwieldy ‘/blog’ suffix and prettied up the landscape, though for some reason didn’t move all the old posts across. I don’t expect any change in general essentialness.

Jack Marx slams dead lady (thanks to Ozi Batla for the link). What’s the opposite of a back handed compliment, you know where something sounds like an insult but in context is actually quite nice. Well a lot of people seemed to miss this one. PS Jack’s comments made me laugh out loud.

Oh and tonight is the right time for listening to FBI (don’t you always?) and another session of Join The Dots. No guests this week. Instead listen to songs by Severed Heads, Bobby Bare, PJ Harvey, and others.

Kieran Carroll, the self-described “last man standing” in Melb’s indie pop juggernaught The Beautiful Few, was my guest on Join the Dots tonight. If you’re into the Go Betweens, the Underground Lovers, Triffids or Orange Juice then I’d recommend listening to the latest CD, DIY Heartbreak. It’s only available online. From Itunes, emusic or Audio Lunchbox, but go straight to the source and get it from their label Big Rig Records.

Reflection – Vertigo
Metamatics – Dentosen (Shit Hot Pod remixed by Yasume)
As One – Brown, Blue, Brown on Blue
Stacey Pullen – Vertigo
Nu Era & Pavel Dego Kostiuk – Nana Nomura
Tek 9 – Keep It Hot (feat What What – IG Culture remix)
Inquiet – Bears
The Beautiful Few – Days Like Humphrey B Bear
Black Cab – Underground Star
Crow – God-fearing Shareholders of the Lord
Augie March – Century Son
The Beautiful Few – Private World
Sisters of Mercy – More
The Mission – Shades of Green (Part II)
Mission – Last Night
Tortoise – Dot/Eyes
The Roots – Game Theory (feat Malik B)
Sylk 130 – All The Way Live (feat Capitol A)
Senor Coconut – Smoke on the Water

Tune in to Join the Dots on FBI tonight from 9 until 11pm for an interview with Kieran Carroll from Melbourne’s The Beautiful Few.

Anna‘s show on FBI is not just a favourite radio program, it’s part of the fabric of my weekends. But there’s more to that dulcet voice than just weekend lunch radio. As a freelance producer at Radio National, Anna recently produced a documentary on the young musician and illustrator Mazen Kerbaj. She told me at the J Awards on Friday she saw the story building and couldn’t believe noone else had picked it up. Eventually Anna couldn’t help but tell the story in the form she’s most comfortable with, radio doco.

Kerbaj, a French-Lebanese man who found himself in Beirut during the recent conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, started a blog to record the experience. His simple illustrations and words drew up to 20,000 unique viewers a day.

The doco goes to air as part of RN’s ongoing Street Stories program, but you can download it from here.

If there are any Australian music awards left for Adelaide’s Hilltop Hoods to win I’m sure they don’t care. They’ve taken out both ends of the spectrum – the ARIAs and now Triple J’s second J Award. I’m not a huge fan, but it is cool when real bands win these things, and looking at the relatively average lineup of bands that Triple J calls best of the year, there was no question that the Hoods were not going to win the prize.

Nominees for the J Award included SubAudible Hum, Blue King Brown, Sarah Blasko, Macromantics, Bob Evans, Dan Kelly & The Alpha Males, The Sleepy Jackson, The Grates, Gotye, Augie March, The Living End and the Hilltop Hoods.

I haven’t thought about what my list would look like, but Triple J’s ‘best of the year’ was a little underwhelming. 2005′s list included Pivot, the Herd and Architecture in Helsinki, all albums that were year highlights. This year’s was different, and the vibe at the award yesterday was different too. The presentation itself was so short and gone in a second, it ended up being a bit of an anticlimax. Everyone seemed to be at the Annandale last year, but a lot of people didn’t bother heading down to the Gaelic Club. Was great to run into a handful of friends, but the ultimate disappointment came when I bailed on the awards to go and buy records at Jimmy Sing’s and he wasn’t open.