I have to admit — I missed the boat on Ra Ra Riot.

While TiFaux John has long championed the band (they’re from his native Syracuse), I never got around to listening to them til the week after they came to town.  However, YouTube is in town every day of the year — so you can watch the video for “Ghost Under Rocks” any time you want to.

You can tell this for yourself, but Ra Ra Riot (despite the rowdy name) makes brisk chamber pop — earthy, but light, rock sounds augmented by (a pair of hot babes playing) violin and cello. “Ghost Under Rocks” is one of the bands more ominous sounding songs — it has some great tension that never quite releases — but I like its drama.

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.

So MTV decided to dedicate an entire section of its website to, whoa, music videos. Though not quite the exhaustive archive I’d like, and though it lists all “the” bands under “t,” what’s truly important is that I can now embed high-quality versions of music videos like this:

You’re welcome.

In the true spirit of internet music television, I want to share this YouTube clip I found a while ago.

Backstory: there’s a band called Fleet Foxes from Washington state who sing delicate, pretty songs that sound like they were conceived in the woods.

As such, when these two Swedish sisters (apparently aged 15 and 17) decided to record a cover of Tiger Mountain Peasant Song, they went out in the woods to do it. It’s a pretty spellbinding cover too.  I’m always really amazed by well executed harmonies (except if they’re by douche-y college a cappella bands — my apologies if you were in one [but not really]), and this is pretty amazing.

And, despite my fascination with novelty and twee, there is nothing crazy at the end of this video. No tap dance solo, no chorus of kazoos.  It’s just two gals in the woods, wearin’ some plaid and singin’. Take a look.

By the way, the girls call themselves First Aid Kit.  You can search for more of their stuff on YouTube.

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.