The new music year always begins with Eurosonic. In January, European bands head to Groningen in the Netherlands to play for festival bookers, promoters, agents, managers, broadcasters, journalists and music fans in a couple of dozen great venues in the city.
This year was Eurosonic’s 30th outing, the festival having slowly grown into a serious piece of business over the past few decades.
Drawing together key broadcasters and festival bookers, Eurosonic has become an essential guide to new European music. Acts who want to impress those important constituencies know that a great Dutch performance in January can mean a busy summer for them on the festival circuit and increased media profile to boot.
Festival bookers regard Eurosonic as a great place acts to play their stages. This in turn has led to the development of the European Talent Exchange Program. It’s a great use of European Union cash, with new acts who impress at Eurosonic in January getting funded to play at festivals throughout Europe during the year.
Some 95 festivals, including Ireland’s Body & Soul, are now signed up to the scheme, and the 345 acts who played in Groningen last weekend - including Irish acts such as The Academic, Otherkin, Ciaran Lavery, Colm Mac Con Iomaire, The Hot Sprockets, The Young Folk, Marc O’Reilly, Pleasure Beach, Craig Gallagher and Rusangano Family - will be hoping to be busy this summer as a result.
Here, then, are the 10 acts who made the biggest impression on this writer last weekend.
RUSANGANO FAMILY
You could have powered Groningen for a night with the energy generated at the Platformtheater when mynameisjOhn, God Knows and MuRli hit the stage. The Clare/Limerick trio have a rep at home for explosive live shows and it's something which definitely improves with travel. The best tracks are cuts from their forthcoming album, especially the spoken-word passages, which were sharp, emotional and powerful.
PROMISE AND THE MONSTER
Billie Lindahl picked a good time to come to Groningen. The Swedish musician is about to release her third album, Feed the Fire, as Promise and the Monster, and there were a lot of wows about her band's various shows around town. Lindahl and co come with a good sense of classic, dark alternative rock from the 1960s to date, but there's also a haunting folk spirit at the heart of the tunes. It looks like the Bella Union label have another hit on their hands.
DUA LIPA
About three songs into her set at the Vera club, Dua Lipa plays Be the One, and the show goes from pretty decent to super-stellar. The young London-based singer-songwriter with a Kosovo/Albania family background sounds and looks like a pop star in the making. The more the set goes on, the more her strong, striking voice and distinctive popcraft casts a spell. She may not have made the BBC Sound of 2016 shortlist but we reckon you'll still be hearing more from her this year and beyond.
LISS
There is something happening in Denmark: we saw about half-a-dozen Danish bands in Groningen and every single one of them were top notch. Liss are a bunch of schoolfriends from Aarhus whose elegantly funky and blissful pop touches all manner of bases from Tom Tom Club and Arthur Russell to Prince and Orange Juice. Teenage kicks and new gold dreams coming together with great aplomb.
NINOS DU BRASIL
Hear the drummers get wicked. Ninos du Brasil's set-up has Italian duo Nico Vascellari and Nicolo Fortuni at the front of the stage banging, thumping and bashing a single floor tom apiece, with tough techno beats kicking out the jams. A duo with hardcore punk rock roots, Ninos du Brasil's punk, new-school Batucada has already attracted attention from the DFA label. Tailormade for a festival stage near you this summer.
KOALA VOICE
These kids hail from Kisovek in the middle of Slovenia, where there was little to do bar forming a band. Playing smashing pop-punk tunes with killer riffs, Koala Voice have many trump cards to make it worth a festival bookers' time, especially the snappy way frontwoman Manca Trampus dispatches those tunes.
RATIONALE
For a lad who has only been playing live for a few wet weeks, Tingshé Fazarkerly is proving to be quite the find. The Londoner's deep, soulful voice is one reason to be cheerful, but he also has a bunch of strong, endearing, emotional songs which remind you of Frank Ocean and Drake.
LIIMA
You will know three of the people onstage from their work with Efterklang. On this occasion, Danish musicians Casper Clausen, Rasmus Stolberg and Mads Brauer are joined by Finnish percussionist Tatu Rönkkö, who used to occasionally appear onstage with Efterklang as a jobbing musician. The dynamic here means the new outfit's sound leans far more towards the groove, each track pushed along by a gnarly electronic pace and classic sense of experimentation.
HYDROGEN SEA
This Brussels duo know all about casting a spell. Singer Birsen Uçar has a voice which catches all those classic notes from Julee Cruise to Victoria Legrand, while multi-instrumentalist PJ Seaux has a sound in his head which he recreates with beautiful, wobbly synth waves and dark, enticing beats. It's enough to make all those watching in a packed café stop sipping their espressos and lattes and pay closer attention.
BLAUE BLUME
More Danes in the house, Blaue Blume are a band who take their name from German poet Joseph von Eichendorff and who have a sure touch when it comes to songs full of drama and poise. Frontman Jonas Smith has a distinctive, beautiful falsetto, while the rest of the band's organic, atmospheric soundscapes add colour, crunch and heft to the mix. There are touches and flashes of Jeff Buckley and Sigur Rós in here, but this is a band very comfortable in their own skin about where this music is taking them.
LISTEN HERE
Want to know more? Head over to Jim Carroll's On the Record blog to hear tracks from the best acts at this year's Eurosonic
