More music!

This is a video by a fun band called CSS — which is short for Cansei de Ser Sexy (”Tired of Being Sexy” in Portuguese). They’re a mostly-female Brazilian band that plays sassy electronic rock music, much of it having to do with pop culture. Remember that song “Music is My Hot Hot Sex” from the iPod commercial?  That’s them.

The video for Move finds the band galavanting about, taking Polaroids of each other doing wacky things. It’s enough to make you wish that instead of working in an office you were actually just a free-wheeling hipster with tight pants, an old-fashioned van and an entourage of like-minded bohemians.

I think I’m going to post more music videos on TiFaux.

It may seem like a bit of a distraction from our main topic of television, but I have justified my music posts before. Basically, I can excuse myself for shifting focus because MTV doesn’t really show a lot of music these days, rendering a lot of videos useless (especially indie ones).

Plus, with the lack of television news to write about in recent months, there’s a lot more going on in the music world than on TV. You have no idea how hard it’s been to come up with shit to write about over this summer.

Here’s Crystal Castles’ scary new video for Crimewave.  It mixes zombies and hipsters.  The result, as you may be able to guess, are some people who look very, very hungry.

Crystal Castles - Crimewave (Crystal Castles VS. Health)

It’s about the cutest video about death you could possibly imagine.

Watch it?

Now you have a crush on Zooey Deschanel. You’re welcome.

Johnny Foreigner. Not to be confused with Foreigner, Foreigner. Just so you know.

Moving on — welcome to the song that I was introduced to just yesterday and have become utterly obsessed with. Johnny Foreigner is a British trio whose album hasn’t even come out in the U.S. yet. But, if you watch the following clip, you’ll be familiar with them. And that doesn’t that make you feel in the know?

Well, it’s available online, but not in stores.

The Johnnies have played in the U.S. already opening up for TiFaux favorites Los Campesinos!.  This single, unfortunately named “Salt, Pepa and Spinderella,” is exactly the kind of thing I eat up — boy/girl vocals, huge urgent melodies and very pleasing harmonies. For what it’s worth, the video is kind of interesting too. It seems like it’s an animated clip made up of photographs, but with various depth of field experiments throughout.

Here it is:

Johnny Foreigner- Salt, peppa and spinderella from Best Before Records on Vimeo.

I don’t dance. I guess that makes me a bad gay, but it’s just a fact.

However, on the rare occasions my body is in motion (running, chugging down city streets with my headphones on), I do like to listen to something with a little bit of a beat. And that’s where Girl Talk comes in.

Girl Talk is the one-man band of Gregg Gillis. He is the ultimate mish-masher of popular music, ranging from punk rock to gangsta rap to golden oldies to 80s pop. His records are fun to listen to because you can listen to them and try to guess the various snippets. His latest album is Feed the Animals.

John directed me towards some fun YouTube clips that match up Girl Talk’s songs with the corresponding videos. Just in this first clip, you see Busta Rhymes, The Police, Faith No More, Paula Cole and, I think, The Cure.

Take a look:

No one’s happy to be up early in the morning. But when you have Feist singing a kid-ified version of 1-2-3-4 (surrounded by furry monsters and penguins), suddenly you may feel like you may not actually snap at any minute.

I’ve known about this site for a while now, but I’m just getting to post about it now because you guys have to see one of these clips.

Let me back up.

There’s this French Web site called (of course) La Blogotheque. They make little films out of performances by various indie musicians (filmed in locations around the world). They’ve got Jose Gonzalez, The Big Sleep, Hutch and Kathy from The Thermals, Bon Iver, R.E.M., etc. In short, a pretty strong guest list. With each performance, they put the artist in a sort of unique location and incorporate some sort of interesting art film-y angle to the video.

To provide you with an example, here’s a video of Wet and Rustling by the band Menomena. You guys, you have to watch it because about halfway through it gets to be the cutest god damned thing I’ve ever seen in my life. And, you know, the song is good too.

Have you ever heard of a band called Cloud Cult?

Their schtick (not to reduce them to just being a band with a gimmick — but they do have a schtick) is that they have a painter create a work of visual art while they do their concerts. The band’s sound is urgent rock and roll augmented by a small string section — so it’s very conducive for painters to get “in the zone.”

So they recently showed up on Carson Daly’s show to perform. You can see the clip below.

If you liked the music and, more importantly, the painting you can buy it on eBay. As of this writing it’s only about $335 — which is a lot for bloggers, but not for people who buy original artwork.

Via Brooklyn Vegan.

PS — I give Carson Daly a hard time, which he probably doesn’t deserve. Seems like a nice enough guy — he dated the lovely Jennifer Love Hewitt after all. However, it is very easy and his show has some inexcusably bad comedy.

It’s true that kids who grew up in the 80s are now at the age when we’re steering the edgiest music out there. This phenomenon is evidenced by Crystal Castles’ debut, which features a lot of inspiration from 8-bit video game sounds, augmented by digital hardcore shouts. The band, named for She-Ra’s castle (see, another TV tie-in), has previously remixed a lot of other bands’ material.

Personally, I like Crystal Castles at their most intense — when the electronic blips are going out of control and singer Alice Glass is screaming the hardest. Not that you asked, but if you want to download some songs, I’d recommend Xxzxcuzx Me or Alice Practice. However, their video is for a more subdued track called Courtship Dating. You can kind of get a feel for their vibe here — at least the darkness and robotic tendencies.

I’m declaring today Los Campesinos Day.  In honor of this Welsh band, you can’t use any vowels all day.

I’ve covered this band before in these virtual pages, but a lot of awesome stuff is happening with this band behind the scenes at TiFaux.  First of all, TiFaux John and I saw them on Friday (they were great!). Second of all, I wrote my second Washington Post article on them.  Third of all, TiFaux Cristin’s brother’s band, Titus Andronicus, will be opening up for them tonight.

In any case, the band’s new album “Hold On Now, Youngster” is out now and you should definitely give it a listen. Here’s a song that won’t be on the album, but you can still buy it off iTunes if you’re feeling the urge.  It’s called “International TweeXCore Underground.”