Liars' "Scissor" from A Bruntel on Vimeo.

For music video directors and fans of the medium, the video sharing platform Vimeo has been a beacon of high quality viewing for a few years now, ever since high-definition video became more widespread. The vibe is completely different from YouTube, its monstrous kin in function only. If YouTube is the corporate megamall, a seemingly endless fount of videos of kittens lapping water from kitchen faucets (not that we don’t love that), then Vimeo is its much cooler small-scale sibling, selling handcrafted goods from organic materials. In other words, high-definition videos from people who regard pixel counts with the same giddy reverence as the luxury hotelier regards his 1,000-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets.

With the first international Vimeo Awards, feted earlier this month, the company based in New York sought to capitalize on its specific brand of high-end chic, the kind that has drawn discerning artists such as Kanye West, a longtime Vimeo user, and Ruben Fleischer, director of “Zombieland.”  Selecting from more than 6,500 entries from more than 80 countries, Vimeo eventually narrowed it down to five videos in each of its nine categories, including narrative, experimental, documentary and music video.

The judges, including M.I.A., Roman Coppola, David Lynch, Morgan Spurlock and local artist Charlie White, have the kind of hipster cachet rarely seen outside a Jim Jarmusch project. They crowned their winners Oct. 9 in New York, choosing Andy Bruntel of our fair city as the winner of the music video category.

If Prince had decided to take up esoteric mathematics instead of sex-god funk, that career might be  something Fol Chen could get behind. The Highland Park band's screwball pastiche pop sounds like an algebra problem but feels like a come-on. At Tuesday night's release party for Fol Chen's second album, "Part II: The New December" (which, admittedly, should have taken by Coheed and Cambria), the band pulled the neat trick of making its two impulses -- danceable pop immediacy and its need to run every song through a paper shredder -- feel unexpectedly simpatico.

For an act that goes by aliases, riffs on Nabokov's penchant for misdirection and refuses to show its members' faces in photos, Fol Chen really is a singles band. Members had a humdinger in the jaunty, deadpan "Cable TV" from their debut, "Part 1: John Shade, Your Fortune's Made." They have another one, "In Ruins," from this record that should be enough to carry them nationally. It starts with a junk-shop Arabesque synth riff, dragging fuzz bass and one of the creepiest pickup lines in recent rock: "You look good by siren light." But the end result has a sort of jerky, bloodless R&B; simmer that's unexpectedly entrancing. 

Few bands know how to be simultaneously funny and scary as well as Liars. The perennially expatriated trio (most recently from Berlin) has examined many styles, from the damned and danceable growl of Suicide, to an archly dumb-as-a-post rock riffage to an ambient swoon worthy of their good friends in Radiohead.

On its latest album, “Sisterworld,” (whose recording was itself an L.A. noir tale of weed stores and sci-fi sex parties), the band finally synthesized all these impulses into something singular and deliciously unnerving. But at the El Rey Theatre on Saturday, the band played it as a black comedy for stateless weirdos.

Much of this is to the credit of frontman Angus Andrew. Like fellow native Aussie Nick Cave, he’s a stringy-haired, gravel-voiced prophet of doom who, if music ceases to work out for him, could easily start a career shooting people for fun in Coen brothers movies.

He trawls the stage maintaining a facial expression of uniform displeasure at his audience, his band and himself alike, all while poking at a bank of electronics like it was something spoiled in the back of his fridge. On record, his vocal presence is defiantly spooky; live though, it’s clear he’s having the time of his life up there.