When I heard that Antony wouldn’t be coming to play Dublin in the Hercules and Love Affair gig on June 1st, I wasn’t too impressed — esp given that the ticket price is as high as EUR 30, when their UK gigs are going for 15 quid.
Week of Gigs continues, with Ladytron tonight at Tripod, and Glass Candy playing Maximum Joy at The Button Factory.
I’ll be heading along to Ladytron. I would have liked to go to Glass Candy, but to be honest I’m knackered and the idea of a show starting at 11pm is too much for me nowadays, having to get up early to wipe baby’s arses and what-not. So not rock and roll.
Anyway, I’m not entirely sure how great a Glass Candy gig is going to be — in my opinion they might be better on wax than live — I’d be happy to hear I’m wrong though!
Here’s Glass Candy playing their cover of Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love” in London last week:
Bonus — here’s the tune that got me hooked, a classic from 2005’s Iko EP:
German techno group Scooter have knocked Madonna off the number one spot in the UK album chart. ‘Jumping All Over the World’, the group’s first UK album since 2002, went straight in as a new entry.
6AM! In the Morning!! Time for SCOOTER!!!
If you ask me, that’s unsurprising, considering it contains possibly the oddest cover concept of recent years, namely Scooter covering The Sisters of Mercy’s ‘Marian’:
Very odd. Quite pedestrian, and breaks into depressed-sounding German halfway through… wtf.
Hey! In other news, it’s week of gigs! A huge gang of us went to see Iron and Wine at the Olympia on Sunday, highlight of which was an electrifying encore of “Resurrection Fern”:
The hair was standing on the back of my neck. Fantastic.
After the gig, we retired to the Oak around the corner for a couple of post-gig pints. One of our friends spotted the band wandering past, leapt out, and bodily dragged them into the bar, diverting them from their bus for the next gig in Glasgow.
All credit to The Dude, with his amazing collection of 100 tiny percussion instruments. My favourite was the 5 tiny bells, I think. Mrs. Undersea in particular was a massive fan.
So, Crystal Castles use bleepy chiptunes sounds, although apparently separately
from the chiptunes scene, just because they sound
cool, and because they grew up with those noises just like we did:
It was only to create annoying sounds. That keyboard was made back in 2004
and then we learned about this whole 8-bit scene, which we don’t really have
anything to do with. It’s a completely different world.
One time is, maybe, a careless mistake. Two, three, four times over is
kleptomania. The worst part is that they distance themselves — a ‘completely
different world’ — from the very same community that they are influenced by.
Chiptunes? Not cool. Asshole douchebaggery? Totally hipster!
As you may have noticed, we release all our music under a Creative Commons
BY-NC-ND License here at 8bitpeoples. What this means is that you’re free to
share it however you like, with whomever you like. All we ask in return is
that you credit it appropriately, do not use it for any commercial purposes,
and obtain permission before creating any derivative works (such as remixing
it or using it as the soundtrack for a video). Crystal Castles has violated
every term of this license in their use of Lo-Bat’s music.
If you’re going to sample from an underground scene, it’s only fair to credit and
be cool about it. wtf.
Finally, while I’m posting — classic 1978 epic Italo-electro mp3 over at xxjfg — Automat, ‘The Rise, The Advance, the Genus’. Imagine a 16-minute long Kraftwerk tune with massive bombastic build-ups and breakdowns; a favourite of mine…
Wow. US-based players of GTA IV can buy copies of in-game music, without leaving the game — cool. The more interesting bit is this, though — sounds like Rockstar might be doing a better job of tracking down rightsholders for the music they’re licensing this time around than they did last time:
[Rockstar] is one of the few game developers that actually creates and licenses its own soundtracks — a task often left to the game publisher — and the company approaches it with a passion close to music-geek-like obsession.
Consider the back story on how the 1979 cult classic “Walk the Night” by the Skatt Bros. came to appear on the soundtrack. Skatt Bros. member Sean Delaney — also known as the “fifth member of Kiss” for his writing and production work with the rock band — died in 2003, leaving his publishing share to a brother, a sister and a nephew living somewhere in Utah. They proved so hard to find that Rockstar went through the trouble of hiring a private investigator who flew to Orum, Utah, to locate them.
“It was just one of those songs we just couldn’t let go of,” Rockstar music supervisor Ivan Pavlovich says. “It fit the game perfectly, so we were obviously determined to track them down.”
When I heard about the “hiring a PI” story, I thought to myself, “why bother? just
pick another tune.” But they’re right — you couldn’t leave this one out:
Erykah Badu has always been the most interesting new soul singer, and her new album New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War is an incredible return to form after a long absence. It’s a mixture of social commentary in the classic 70s style of Gil Scott Heron or Marvin Gaye with the latest in leftfield hiphop production by Madlib and 7th Wonder.
The most conventional track on the album is Honey, but luckily the relatively innocuous music gets a syncopated tweak by Seiji of Bugz In The Attic
