I discovered Firekites through a great design blog I read. It’s a little odd that I read a design blog, considering the fact that I generally don’t care what things look like.  I appear to have missed the gay gene where you’re supposed to have a flair for interior design (case in point my 30-year-old hand-me-down living room furniture).

But I watched the video and found myself much more carried away with the song than the video (which is, admittedly, pretty cool). The song is by an Australian band called Firekites and they make some subdued, mostly acoustic music that brings to mind Tunng or Sufjan Stevens (although is everything that is quiet compared to Sufjan? I think so. Oh well).

Here’s the video — it’s called Autumn Story.

Metric is part of the big, bad Canadian invasion of indie rockers.  It’s been going on for a while now, if you didn’t know.

Frontwoman Emily Haines is part of the Broken Social Scene collective (along with Feist, Jason Collett, etc.), but has gotten most of her fame from Metric — a heavy, synth-infused rock band that just released its new album Fantasies. This is the band’s first album in several years, with Haines taking off some time to record some solo material (brittle acoustic numbers credited to Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton).

It would seem that she got the mellowness out of her system, though, as the new album isn’t lacking for energy. The best example is the single “Gimme Sympathy,” which you can find below.

If you get a chance, I’d recommend seeing them if they come to your town. The band’s live show is pretty stellar, with Haines stealing the show with her charisma and Tinkerbell-in-a-bug-zapper vocal theatrics.

If you liked this video, you can see an acoustic version here.

Don’t you love it when you completely forget about a band you love and then, suddenly and dramatically, they’re back in your life?

Case in point — Noisettes’ new single “Wild Young Hearts”  from their forthcoming album of the same name. It’s blends the band’s distinct noisy energy (that I love) with an old timey-jazz vibe. And singer Shingai Shoniwa is beautiful and charming as always — her presence is absolutely magnetic and I still don’t understand why she’s not a huge superstar.

Watch the video here and tell your friends.

Now that everyone’s finished contributing their music videos, the gang has left me to bat clean-up (<– sports reference!).

For the record, though, I do remember watching Total Request Live and even kinda-sorta having an investment who won. Hell, I remember Dial MTV — the no-frills precursor to TRL (which was probably followed by a nice game of Remote Control). But those were the glory days. The times before they devoted the shows to children giving testimonials to the artists and screaming over the music.

Kids today.

Meanwhile, my videos. There’s really no rhyme or reason to this — some of it is nostalgia-driven, some of it is stuff I just thought was cool.

Radiohead - Just

This video sticks with me as one of my all-time favorites. I like a good narrative in a music video. Plus, when this came out I thought the ending was really compelling. I won’t ruin it for you if you haven’t seen it, but teenage Dan was really into it.

When Marisa asked me to write about music videos for TRL’s last week, I contemplated my fraught relationship with the art form. I was a delayed arrival to pop culture, to say the least (I was still listening to the oldies station until eighth grade), and tended toward pretty safe mainstream choices. I’m not actually sure if any of these, other than “I Want It That Way,” were on TRL, but they’re each vivid musical memories. Unlike the bongo-accompanied rendition of the Foo Fighters’ “Learn to Fly” that’s currently emanating from beneath my living-room floorboards.

Backstreet Boys

This is really the only one of these videos that I distinctly remember watching on TRL, and it was at an embarrassingly late age, too, because this video was on TRL during the only period in my high school career when I would have been at home at 3 o’clock in the afternoon to watch: Just before and after graduation. Yes, I was watching the Backstreet Boys (semi-obsessively, too), at the age of nearly 18. I am ashamed of that. But not too ashamed not to write about it on a website read by tens of people.

NSYNC

My friend Lisa actually taught herself this dance (without the help of Darrin’s Dance Grooves! I don’t think she slept when we were sophomores) and performed it, repeatedly, in our newspaper office very late at night. She’s a lawyer now. And I recall watching a making-of show on MTV that went into great detail about how the boys’ oh-so-realistic doll façades were accomplished. I think shellac was involved. Damn, they sold a lot of CDs. Back when people (other than Jesse) bought CDs. Eight years ago.

Daft Punk

I did not realize Michel Gondry directed this! In high school, my friend Andrew used “Around the World” as the curtain-call music for the short play he directed (the cast was affectionately referred to as the Denver Nuggets because they had so little chance of winning the county-wide short play competition they entered that year) and at the end of the show, the whole cast just grooved for a couple of minutes. At one point the Fresh Prince dance was involved. No, not that one. The other one.

Madonna

So when I was at church music camp in 1995, we were informed in one seminar that the Catholic Church had banned “Like a Prayer.” We were Presbyterians, so we went ahead and watched it and talked about the imagery. I, of course, mainly recognized Leon from Cool Runnings and wondered what was up with the burning crosses. (I was a sheltered 14-year-old.)

The Cardigans

I was fifteen when Romeo + Juliet came out. And like every other teenage girl in those years, I absolutely loved this song, totally thought it was about my imaginary relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio, and wondered what sort of horrifying chemical contact lenses would be required to turn my eyes that color. And then there was the rest of the soundtrack, which introduced me to Garbage, Radiohead, Prince, and drag. If Australia has half the impact on me this movie did, it’ll be the greatest film of the last five years.

And one more…Oasis.

This is my very favorite song. And I like the video because it looks like the Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit, and because visually, it feels lonely. The song has always felt like the opposite of loneliness to me, and I dig the contradiction. Also, I think Liam totally walks like that.

Ok, so while I may consume television and movies voraciously, I didn’t grow up with cable. And if I happened to be at a friend’s house who had MTV, we were much more likely to watch Beavis & Butthead, which did show music videos, but it showed about as much of the videos as TRL did, and I don’t think there was a lot of content overlap. If I remember correctly, Beavis & Butthead tended to watch videos that either “sucked” or were obscure metal bands.

So I have limited exposure to music videos. I first saw this video for “Once in a Lifetime” on the DVD that came with the fancy Talking Heads box set, and I was shocked that the people who brought you The Hills let this on the air, but apparently it was a well-played video.

Letting a bunch of art school graduates play with video effects on TV has never worked so well.

Continuing our weeklong salute to the even-more-lost art of the music video (check you never, TRL), here are my top five. I don’t know if these are really my five absolute favorites — I tried to work myself into a nostalgic reverie over the videos I remember from high school, but all I could picture were Oasis videos, which were rarely very good, and Aphex Twin videos, which were rarely not terrifying — but these are what feels right at the moment. Also, I already posted Blur’s “Coffee and TV” a week or two ago to celebrate MTV having a website that makes it easy to embed the “Coffee and TV” video (and, secondarily, other videos), so consider these my five favorites besides that one.

5. Fatboy Slim, “Weapon of Choice”

I have to include a Spike Jonze video, and this one gets bonus points for being so much better than the actual song. It also perfectly encapsulates the Jonze style of taking (or coming up with) a deceptively simple premise and running with it for the perfect length of time. Other strokes of his brilliance: “It’s Oh So Quiet,” “Buddy Holly,” “Praise You,” Being John Malkovich, and Adaptation.

In the continuation of our “Salute to TRL” week, I’m pleased to share five of my favorite music videos. The thing to keep in mind while perusing this list is that I watched MTV primarily from 1993-1996, so some of these selections are going to be of the fondly-nostalgic-but-bad variety. With that caveat in mind, let’s get to it!

5. All Apologies, Nirvana Unplugged

Not technically a video, but MTV used to play it as one. This concert first aired in 1993, putting it smack at the start of my MTV years. I loved this song — what angsty 7th-grader wouldn’t? — and the low-key atmosphere of the Unplugged concert was a great introduction to music I might have been too scared to listen to otherwise. This is the beginning of years of wearing Doc Martens and flannel shirts. (And here’s Smells Like Teen Spirit for good measure.)

TRL goes dark on November 16, after MTV airs a two-hour special they’re calling “Total Finale Live.” Carson Daly’s coming back for it and everything. (But will my not-so-secret crush, Gideon Yago, return to do the news?) To pay tribute to the show, TiFaux has planned a whole week of music-video musings.

Not that TRL itself is all that worthy of commemoration. Most of the time, they chose to broadcast only an excerpt of a video in favor of showing the faces of hysterical teenagers. But with the end of TRL comes the end of any kind of music on MTV, even if it was just lip service at the end, and that’s significant given the network’s mammoth role in the history of popular music. Sure, we’ll all still watch videos on the Internet, but we won’t all be watching the same ones anymore. It’s bittersweet.

Here’s another fun fact: My older sister—the one who sat me down and explained to me who Britney Spears was when I visited her in college, making college seem even stranger than I imagined it to be—was actually on TRL once. She requested “Jumper” by Third Eye Blind because Stephen Jenkins was so hot WOOOOOO! She showed me the tape of it—from the same VHS on which she’d recorded the “Baby One More Time” video—and then told me afterward that they told her which video to request (well, they gave her a choice of ten) and told her what to say. (She was all, “What should I say?” And they were all, “Just call the band hot or something.”) So, there’s my insight into TRL in its last week. It was all a lie.

But videos aren’t lies. Videos are great. After the jump, I list my five favorites.