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:

Glass Candy - Sugar and Whitebread

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”:

Iron and Wine - 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.

Tonight’s Yeasayer at Whelan’s. Should be good….

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.

That’s cool. It sounds great, anyway.

However… this ‘different world’ story seems to be unravelling. It seems they’ve been using extensive samples of original chiptunes from the 8-bit community, and violating the licensing terms for attribution-required Creative Commons-licensed music. As n0wak says:

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!

The 8bitpeoples response is worth reading too:

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.

While we’re talking about CC and chiptunes, check out this awesome 8-bit cover of ‘Crimewave’ ;) –

Dauragon88 - Crimewave (Crystal Castles cover)

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:

The Skatt Brothers - Walk The Night

Super-camp hard rocking disco, as heard on Optimo’s “Psyche Out” and frequent appearances in the CBS Top 100… tune!

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

Erykah Badu - Honey (Seiji Mix).

Ladytron - Ghosts

I’m really loving it. Not sure about the album yet though, but it took me a while to get into “Witching Hour” too…

Here’s some classic icy ‘tron, from their first album, “604″:

Ladytron - I’m With The Pilots

– Mentasms, via Eoghan. love it!

It wasn’t great… I’ve been loving the album, so I was really looking forward to the gig. But the live format was a bit meh, as Nialler noted — their set was a measly 25 minutes long; the sound was a mess, making it hard to make out which tune was which; quite a few of their best tunes were AWOL, such as “Untrust Us”; and there was no encore. On top of that, the support DJ was shite.

Still, the gig was cheap — 13 squids, and the support band Ugly Megan were quite cute. And — megabonus — I finally got to meet up with Nialler in person! ;)

One thing that was a little disconcerting was the age/fashion profile of the crowd. It was overwhelmingly full of hip, angular-haircutted 18 year olds — much more than any other gig I’ve been at in Dublin recently. This has thrown up some great threads at On The Record and UnaRocks… plenty of old indie rock fans gnashing their teeth about these mysterious youngsters suddenly appearing at a gig, when they haven’t been seen before “on the scene”.

There’s an easy answer as to why this happened — there aren’t many bands playing Dublin on the nu-rave end of the spectrum. The Dublin gig scene is still pretty rockist.

Some great pics of Alice over at State, btw.

This is turning out to be a pretty busy month…

This would be all well and fantastic — except that’s just two days after Crystal Castles play the same venue. wtf! Unfortunately I’ve already got my Crystal Castles tix — and I’m looking forward to that gig anyway. But I would have loved to hit both, and it’s just not possible with only 2 days between ‘em.