I got to New York City at 11am on Tuesday Morning. By 12.45 I had completed my two main objectives for the week: eaten a cob salad from Fabien's on Bedford Avenue, and eaten a Pay Day (Pay Day's are the best candy bar in the world: salted peanuts coated in caramel).

With this peace of mind I set off to the BLVD venue, where NME had a party with loads of great bands: Golden Silvers, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Darwin Deez, Apache Beat, Your Nature and more...

Darwin Deez was my personal highlight. My friends in New York kept bugging me about how when all the Brits invade for CMJ we seem to conjure these local 'buzz' bands out of nowhere, and certainly it seems with Darwin that the hype has built on UK soil and is rippling back. It's definitely not music for the cynical, the lyrics are simple and the hooks are immediate. Plus, he looks, well, erm, how he looks. It's total distilled good-times energy. But there's just something irresistibly cute and honest about it.

continued...

My fav song: 'Radar Detector'

Things like this happen onstage from time to time:

After the show I caught up with Darwin for a chat and he revealed sombre new undertones to his seemingly relentlessly cheery assualt.

Later that night, the singer of NY's Apache Beat, Ilijrana, Paul who runs the rather hip LA label IAMSOUND (Florence, Suckers, Little Boots, Fools Gold etc) and I had an inebriated debate about the virtues of our respective homelands to the picturesque backdrop of a Big Apple nightscape. Enjoy.