We love those Mongrel guys – and after last night’s scenes following their show at Eurosonic I hereby decree that Drew McConnell is the only man in rock allowed to wear sunglasses indoors.

Mongrel's Drew and Lowkey

Last night (January 16) I saw Errors, James Yuill, The Rakes and Mongrel. You can wait until a week on Wednesday for the full review, but until then here’s what we have learned during the Eurosonic experience:

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Festival season has begun! I’m hip-high in mud, making devil horn signs with cider-sheened hands and trying to forget that I just paid £40 to a man in a jester hat for ten aspirin tablets that aren’t making me want to inappropriately hug anyone. Rock’n’roll!

OK, I was getting a touch carried away there – it’s a good few months before we encounter those kind of scenes. But festival season has kicked off, in a way – I’m at Eurosonic in Groningen, north Holland: a Camden Crawl-type affair but with less Mohawks and much more continental lager. And band names like Vincent Van Go Go.

Oh, and meatballs:

With a population of just over 180,000 Groningen isn’t quite the kind of metropolis you’d expect to attract a venue-hopping music festival such as this. But with a bursting student population and, as a result, a slew of ace venues, it works as well as mayo does with chips (that’s the delicacy here).

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Minus 16 degree cold can’t stop the rock at the M For Montreal festival.

Actually, it could if we had to walk anywhere, but clever festival organisers have put all six acts on tonight’s boutique line-up in two separate rooms the Just For Laughs club, so there’s no time to miss anything. It's a far superior line-up tonight, and we’re noticing a definite electro-punk string running through the Montreal scene that points to plenty of potential successors to Crystal Castles...

Click through for our verdict on each and every act…

(Thanks to Sophie Samson for the pictures)

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Here’s our round up of all the first night’s action from M For Montreal, six back-to-back bands at the city’s Just For Laughs club. There’s two more nights of this to come!

Special thanks to Sophie Sampson for the pictures.

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Greetings from French Canada. We’ve travelled here as part of a contingent of British music types for a cool event called M For Montreal, a kind of miniature South By Southwest designed to showcase the best new music from Quebec and beyond.

Over three nights, there’s a packed programme of back-to-back bands all out to impress the army of festival promoters, record labels, managers and, of course, bloggers. It’s all made possible by the quite amazing way that the Canadian government splashes out on rock’n’roll with support and grant money. And that policy looks like paying off. Crystal Castles, Fucked Up, Holy Fuck and of course Arcade Fire have all risen from the land of the maple leaf to international dominance in recent years. Last year’s big winners from M For Montreal were We Are Wolves, and over the next three nights we’ll be bringing you blow-by-blow accounts of who could be next.

We were going to do you a little video tour of the city so you can see it for yourself – except that last year we had the lovely Melissa Auf Der Maur from Hole and Smashing Pumpkins to do it for us, and as she’s much prettier, we thought we should just show you that one again. It's the same city, after all...

Lordy, how many hand-weaved headbands can one take? If MGMT’s free love psych-pop wasn’t enough to melt our brains with its melodic brilliance, it looks like Amazing Baby are here to make sure our grey matter can well and truly ooze out of our noses. If their show last night at Swn was anything to go by, anyway.

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