Mojo - The Music Magazine

Just up the road: Leonard Cohen's favourite bagel shop. A bit further: Arcade Fire's bohemian Mile End neighbourhood. We're on Montreal thoroughfare Rue St. Laurent attending M For Montreal, an industry shindig for which Arcade Fire are at least partly responsible - it was established in 2006 when Win Butler and co's success had made the Quebec city a fleetingly fashionable bolt-hole for musicians across North America. Six years later, M For Montreal has swollen to a four-day event attended by lanyard-toting music biz delegates from 15 nations. Unlike similar events SXSW and CMJ, it's still very well contained - the 16 to 19 November programme is split between a handful of venues, one of which, Casa del Popolo, is owned and operated by members of local post-rock types Godspeed You! Black Emperor. And you don't get more indie than that.

Canadian delegates from outside of the province seem to view Quebec with a certain amount of bafflement. It's France in a parallel universe: the Metro trains are copies of those found in Paris and there's a miniature Notre Dame cathedral, but where France has haute cuisine, Montreal has poutine, something northern readers would rightly identify as chips and gravy. The city is in its o wn world musically too, judging by some of the local acts displaying their wares in M For Montreal's shop window. One band, Elephant Stone, followed a set of Ananda Shankar-indebted sitar pop with a track that was essentially Bryan Adams' When You're Gone. Another, Buddy McNeil And The Magic Mirrors, played twangy rockabilly in sailor suits. At some of the larger gigs, which were open to the public, crowds went wild for a female singer who joined the dots between Beth Ditto, Celine Dion and Robyn (Ariane Moffat) and an instrumental trio called Platform whose electro-prog-jazz pomp was Muse for the fans on the floor, Bemuse for this correspondent. Strangest of all were the white-suited nerdcore collective Misteur Valaire, whose exotic parlour pop was largely instrumental too, prompting the thought that there might be a tax on vocalists in these parts. When comedy rappers joined in, the feeling was that of a French-language Goldie Lookin' Chain, and the whiff of fromage was too strong to bear.

For a proudly Francophone city, much of the French language music was oddly bundled away in an afternoon showcase, at which Fanny Bloom was the star, her dusky-voiced pop sounding like Ellie Goulding with a ye-ye twist. Elsewhere Anoraak, from Nantes, France, were glossy pop in the vein of Phoenix, with Duran Duran synthesisers and glossy guitar solos.

Other acts communicated via the international language of rock. The local Tonstartssbandht drew from the same stoner rock pipe as Wooden Shjips, albeit with added Black Sabbath grunt. Elsewhere, Uncle Bad Touch's Joan Jett-like female singer was seemingly locked in a power struggle with her male counterpart: her songs were like The Runaways, his were like The Beatles, and the argument soon descended into squally feedback.

Indie music was predictably well represented, with the debut gig from the krauty, shouty Absolutely Free, a band comprising most members of once-hyped locals DD/MM/YYYY, and a performance by relatively hot prospect Young Empires, whose tropical beats set them up as Canada's answer to Friendly Fires. Folk music was ever present too, with locals The Barr Brothers - who really are brothers - turning in a consummately professional, if a little worthy, performance on banjos and acoustics. Fans of "real music" will approve wholeheartedly. Elsewhere, Iceland's Of Monsters And Men brought Mumford & Sons-inspired sea shanties from cold climes - expect to see plenty of them in 2012.

At the far leftfield of the festival's programme were the kind of one-man-and-his-synth bands whose presence at a showcase festival is as certain as that of one of the delegates disappearing to the bar. One of them, the bedraggled D'eon (pictured), wore no shoes, sang like R Kelly and rapped about the Taliban and Pakistan in rhyming couplets. The shoe thing wasn't a purely on-stage affectation: he was spotted hanging around outside the venue in bare feet too. Wearing a harlequin shirt, Toronto's buzzy Doldrums was a comparatively serious proposition but just as off-the-wall, his often atonal, always warped pop layering off-key vocals over samples including a brief snatch of Roy Orbison.

Oddly, the strongest acts at the festival were those largely came from two under-represented genres: pop and hip hop. Slick trio Half Moon Run, a local act whose music suggests twin fandom of Radiohead and Maroon 5 are already polished to a mirror shine. Rapper Cadence Weapon, a newcomer to Montreal having relocated from Edmonton, where he was poet laureate, bolstered his wordy, thoughtful hip hop with big, dubby beats and electronic effects taking his vocals up and down octaves, giving the effect of a one-man rap troupe. "This is no longer a showcase - it's a hip-hop show," he said, decisively.

Did we find the next big thing? Probably not. But we left with a snapshot of today's ever-more dissonant music world and a better understanding of the peculiar, parochial and fiercely productive scene in this one city. One Toronto-based delegate summed the local tastes up pretty well: "This is Quebec - they're freaky here."

Dan Stubbs