My breakdown (rendered inaccurately!):

75% addictive, 20% brilliant, 4.5% 10,000 Maniacs, 0.5% Lavender  Diamond. Been listening to this all week. Favorite song is “Salty”: This weather feels / just like better days.

Buy Album | Listen on Spotify.

85% really good, 10% Annie Lennox, 5% Dirty Projectors, 0% boring.

Get the four-song EP here.

NYC-based Teen have been playing together for about a year now. They’re fronted by Teeny Lieberson, formerly of Here We Go Magic; who’s teamed up with her sisters, Katherine and Lizzie, and two other female musicians, Jane and Maia, to form an all-girl harmonizing powerhouse. I met them in Sunnyside, Queens, to film a few songs; featured here are: “Why Why Why”, “Come Back”, “Charlie” and “In Limbo”. They have some songs up on bandcamp, and you can keep in touch via Facebook.

photo: sarahana

Exciting new band to come out of NYC. These girls can sing.

Met up with Portland trio Nurses for some morning voice over iced-tea, and the piano at Piano’s (!). They played stripped-down versions of some songs from their new album Dracula (while someone diligent cleaned the crap out of that place); included here are “New Feelings” and “Trying to Reach You”. Sounds pretty good…

Unamplified sing-along from last night; I was photographing for Brooklyn Vegan. They’re super young sisters from Sweden, and like all Swedes, they love Bright Eyes. When they first got noticed by doing you tube covers of Fleet Foxes, they were 18 and 15 respectively.

I posted a transcript of a Slavoj Zizek talk last night at the endangered St. Mark’s Bookshop. The talk is as meaty as a Zizek rant can get in an hour. Topics covered include a theoretical discussion of melancholy, mourning and prohibition, and how they apply to the Occupy Wall Street protests as well to the state of the left and modernity, in general; the problematic relationship between democracy and globalization, and how the protests and Anne Applebaum fit into this; the obscene pact of Zionism; the true 99%; a new multi-centric world where countries like India, China and South Korea are buying tracts of land from countries that can barely feed themselves; and lots more.

READ THE TRANSCRIPT

A long time ago, before I went on an indefinite hiatus, I visited Revival Times at an incredible residential space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, converted from an old school gym. Here’s a song off what I filmed then (2 and a half years later!): a more laid back version of “Ear to the Ground”.

ps. I wrote the date the European way. It was filmed March 1st.

Off their new album Little Wind. This one’s from their last NYC show at Union Pool, Brooklyn (boy, people talk a lot at that place!)

You know who’s going to love this Ray Charles / Aretha Franklin cover? You. You’re going to love it. From last night at Rock Shop, Brooklyn. They’re playing 2 more NYC dates: today (Oct 12) at Cake Shop and tomorrow (Oct 13) at Union Pool.