CMJ Recap - Day 2: Shugo, Pho, Assfreezing coldness

As day two's panels cleared up and the sun set, the city was slammed by a cold snap that I don't think anyone was expecting. I recall last year after the panels, sitting in Washington Square Park in the sun, catching up on work and making phone calls. This year after the panels it was dark, Washington Square Park was cut in two and decimated, and the first day of miserable cold weather blew threw the city. Strange.

So I met the girl, and we wandered towards the Lower East Side to see Shugo Tokumaru at The Bowery. On our way there, thanks to Katie's recommendation we grabbed some Pho in a shady Vietnamese place just north of Chinatown. Pho is the shit, when a great mind once said "crack in a bowl", they were right. Get familiar. I think it saved my life, as my body was already protesting the injustices it suffered in a short week, the Pho was the only salve. My brain still hasn't recovered...that's why I'm talking like this.

Anyway, we made it into the Bowery to a spare crowd of beardy hipsters and marketing interns trying to get us to play Guitar Hero in front of a camera. Thanks to Zune and XBox, CMJ was branded strong this year.

Shugo Tokumaru took the stage in his bare feet. Check my ipod and you won't find much stuff like this, but I have his album, and it holds a certain appeal to me that I can't quite pinpoint. Part of it is his simplicity, part of it is the way he says "parachute". Amazing.

This is something like his 3rd ever stateside performance, and its a little loose, but cool nonetheless. I think he can only get better, as he gets more confident in front of a bunch of belching yanks and morons with their hands in their pockets.

Oh yeah, stealth cam again.


After that, we stuck around to see Audrye Sessions, who Michelle LOVED. I thought some of their songs were really great, for one of those bands with a ton of instruments they were really tight, their singer sounded like the guy from Muse, and their bassist looked creepily like one of my ex-girlfriends.


Then we left, as I had already seen Love as Laughter, who were boring and followed only by Margot and the Nuclear So and So's, who are also boring, according to Ant...the authority on boring hipster bands.

There were talks of Psyopus at Knitting Factory, or Adventure at Le Pouisson Rouge, which would have been awesome but the weather blew and Shugo was good enough to justify an entire CMJ night.

More to come. Sorry for the horrid writing here, still trying to discern my ass from my elbow.