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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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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Swn is brilliant. It’s great. If you don’t know what Swn is, you should. And you should be here.

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Saturday 18 October

Not much could impress after a day spent gawping at huge, roiling waterfalls, erupting geysers and rugged rift valleys, but watching the usual festival suspects of the last summer go through the motions, (with honourable mentions to CSS and Crystal Castles, neither of whom would know how to go through a motion if you put neon signposts on it), we’re left with the nagging feeling that this is not what this festival is really all about.

Omnipresent Faroe Island rockers Boys In A Band, who peddle a livewire, Hot Hot Heat-ish brand of meaty indie rock, have been the biggest energy rush of the day, and left Vampire Weekend sounding pretty Upper West Side So-What-O.

Thank the Lord, then, for rockers FM Belfast, local campy electropoppers whose defiant energy in the face of their country’s darkest hour is an inspiration, somewhere between Lo-Fi-Fnk, Hot Chip and The Sugarcubes, with songs about running down the street in their underwear.

They’re joined onstage by what looks like everyone from all the local bands that have played all weekend: rockers Retro Stefson, Benni Hemm Hemm and more, in a hail of glitter and hope. We’re left feeling all a bit overcome with love of our fellow man and such and have to go and have a nice sit down.

Friday 17 October

Watching These New Puritans in Nasa, one of the festival’s main venues, we feel slightly embarrassed and hope no one can tell from the outside that we come from the same country as them. Their by-the-book ‘angular-post-punk’ sound might have been passable four years ago, but their Topshop Pop Group stylings are increasingly sounding like a band who missed their chance.

Far more exciting earlier today was the goings on in the tiny back room of Kaffi Hljomalind, where we watched local whippersnappers Me, The Slumbering Napoleon whip up some lo-fi skewed Sonic Youth/Shellac influenced grunge-pop anti-love songs, before The Mae Shi envelop the small crowd and themselves under a rainbow-coloured parachute like PE teachers use to distract kids when they can’t be arsed. The Mae Shi, though, patently can be arsed, and the way the LA electro-garage-punkers feed off each other’s energy is inspiring to watch.

Also inspiring is local hero and Bjork collaborator Valgeir Sigurdsson, who pairs the sort of warm, earthy beats that Ms Gudmundsdottir does so well with a melange of musical collaborators parping and clattering away on cello, oboe, trombone, accordion…

The results should be twee, especially when they start popping their cheeks and clapping their hands for percussion, but in actual fact it’s incredibly uplifting. Stop smirking, it is. Almost as uplifting as the Fishermans’ Friend-flavoured liqeur we sample in the bar later, which actually sucks all the air out of our lungs. Bracing.