Highlights from the Rotterdam festival including Bathing Suits, Milkweed, Wyatt and much more.

Seething mosh pits, beer flying everywhere, performers diving into the crowd, audience members on stage, band arguments between songs, collapse, coalescence, great tunes. And that was just Omertà on Saturday night. You can’t take your eyes off this band. If you do you are bound to miss something, more likely several things happening all at once. Their weekend-closing set at Salsability perfectly rounded off the happy chaos of a storm-hit edition of Left of the Dial. The Rotterdam multi-venue festival has been a favourite of ours for years and we are not alone in our adulation. This is simply one of the best festivals Europe has to offer for the fan of breaking alternative music, incredible and original curation bringing back discerning crowds and bands keen to play year after year. Somehow the bookers always manage to deliver, refusing to book the same artist twice (with only a few notable exceptions) but always bringing together a finger-on-the-pulse collection of the best new artists going, particularly between the UK and the Netherlands.

A multi-venue festival in the mould of The Great Escape, Left of the Dial sets itself apart not only through curation but also the atmosphere of engaged music fandom which filters down to audience and performers alike. Posters decorate venue walls with lyrics from festival alumni, pre-festival info is designed to give you your best chance to discover your new favourites among the bill, and outside each venue a huge tube man flaps its welcome, inviting you in to Rotterdam’s best live music spots (of which there are many). On the audience’s part, perhaps the best mark of their attentiveness is the way each venue completely empties between sets, everyone rushing off to catch something else as soon as possible and make the most of their four days there. While many of the bands performing have little more than a handful of songs available online and often zero European tour dates no their names, they still draw impassioned and engaged crowds at a festival without headliners which is devoted to the best of the new. This year the howling wind and rain made for some gruesome journeys between venues, but at each destination was the promise of something original and exciting. Then at the close of each day everyone would pile over to Rotown, the festival’s spiritual centre, for a few beers to close out the night.

Over a packed few days, there were so many highlights to pick from. Opening night was dedicated to Dutch bands, who laid down the marker for the weekend and threw up intriguing performances from the likes of the entrancingly danceable art punks Fellatio and the rich guitar textures of Doom Fever. Elsewhere, Normal Village put up one of the most impressive sets of a weekend which underlined the wealth of talent coming from Leeds right now. A staple of Leeds’ scene among Private Regcords label mates like Kiosk and Bathing Suits, the band seem primed to gain wider recognition as one of the best new bands in the UK, their sound an immediate and original reformulation of spiky and sprawling guitar music that does not seem to rely on any of the tired touchstones of its antecedents. Exchanges of guitar licks and shouted vocals over continuously shifting drum patterns are delivered nonchalantly even as a swirling mosh pit consumes the dancefloor of Sahara. Entirely different but similarly impressive, Milkweed provided another standout set of the weekend. With a set like theirs, it almost feels wrong to see anything afterwards, the appropriate course of action being to stew on the majestic and innovative magic of their set. It’s like dining at an expensive restaurant where you eat delicious food, don’t quite fill up, but don’t eat anything else afterwards out of pure respect to the craft. We’re talking cassette tapes and mysterious old folk records being flung onto decks and mixed into the mystery. Banjo feedback solos, abrasive electronics and the most haunting vocals weaving it all together. It’s so cool.

Also among our top acts were Wyatt, whose crunched guitars and heartworn vocals at one point elicited a cry of “I love Neil Young too!” from the crowd. Their songcraft has always sounded strong but now, on the eve of an extensive tour with Westside Cowboy, the band have clearly upped their game, knitting those tunes together in a carefully crafted and maximally impactful live set. Between Wyatt, Pushbike and Bramwell, the latest return of jangling guitars and soaring melodies was well represented at this year’s festival.

On the other end of the spectrum, lttl mort were among those acts indicative of the growing form of live-oriented dance music, showing how fun it can be when the producer steps away from the laptop and gives everything to the performance. Slammed beats from a balaclava-clad drummer played off against snarling vocals and thunderous synth riffs from Jazz Pope, also of Opus Kink, in a set that maximised the physicality of the music with an energy reciprocated by the crowd. In a similar vein, Bathing Suits inevitably staked their own claim for set of the weekend. Already one of the best live bands in the UK right now, they keep finding ways to get better, their set at Annabel upping the theatre of the show in tandem with its noisy apocalyptic intensity, against which floor-filling beats pounded incessantly.

Among our newer discoveries on the bill, Gnarcissists were one of the most entertaining. Grimy, goofy shambling, funny and motherfucking gnarly are the words we’re using for Gnarcissists. Coming all the way from New York to play inside a boat and making their case in only 25 minutes, it is a thrillride with a seeming pace of a song a minute. For such ropey, so-loose-the-wheels-are-about-to-fall-off egg punk action, we look to The Media Puzzle and The Gnomes for comparison, while the histrionic vocals feel almost Cramps-like. They also said where they were from after basically every song and said ‘I am Shelley Duval’ about five times. By comparison, London buzz band Nico and Linus were one of the weekend’s few disappointments, their own brand of Seventies-inspired rock coming off a little too self-serious, especially when interspersed with wailing guitar solos one is these days most likely to hear drifting out of a Denmark Street storefront. We preferred the watchable je ne sais quoi of Spike Fuck, which felt like a looser and more doomy takeoff on the New York Dolls.

Liverpool four-piece Monks brought turned the bar at Theatre Rotterdam into a mid-afternoon party, again underscoring how much can be added to dance music by energetic live performance. The matching fluffy hats were of course also a welcome detail. We also loved the floating delights of Stockholm/Paris duo Kelly No Brakes. The remarkable thing about them is not the rich, Björk-like vocals, the backing tracks or the sumptuous keys (though playing two different keyboards at the same time farms serious aura), it’s how two choruses into every tune the melody has wormed its way into your skull like the scar of an unforgotten dream. Bristol’s Foot Foot crafted a similar mood, in spite of arriving in a fluster of rescheduled set times with what looks like their tour van snacks scattered on among them on stage (Bugles, Walkers and Celebrations among them, these guys have taste). Violins purr, basslines leap and bound, arpeggiators circulate, and when the last song hits the ten minute mark you know they are cooking. They have an EP on the way and we can’t wait. State of Grace also seemed promising, fronted by PJ Harvey-style vocals and backed by Dan Carey on guitar and a drummer we recognised from Bar Italia’s live shows. The live set seemed like it could use a little polish, but this is a project to keep an eye on.

Among it all, we had our own stage running at Club Uniek on Friday afternoon in collaboration with Bristol’s excellent Outer Town Festival. In general, the year’s ‘Official Unofficial’ programme, sanctioned by but separate to the main festival, felt particularly strong, seamlessly extending the musical offerings mostly in the same venues as the evening’s entertainments. Alice Costelloe opened proceedings at Uniek, her gentle but subtly immersive synth driven tunes the perfect way to ease into another packed day of music. Our senses attuned, we were ready for the seven-piece assault of MLEKO, whose epic compositions refuse to sit still as each musician jostles for position. By contrast, AtitcOMatic create something unified and driving, joining each element to make a rich, enveloping sound. Closing the stage were Rotterdam’s own Smudged. A promising pair of opening songs unfortunately gave way to an early finish owing to technical hitches, but they made up for it with their other sets across the weekend, which showed the best of their sprawling dance-edged band sound, evocative of the likes of Warmduscher.

A perk of any multi-venue festival is a look around a city’s best venues, and in this respect too Left of the Dial has a lot to offer. As well as the moving vessel which once again played host to Bands of a Boat, V11 was an intimate favourite at the harbour with its anchor down, a wealth of brunch options adding to the appeal. Two churches, Arminius and Waalse Kerk made for appropriately dramatic venues for Ropeburn, The Healing Power of Horses and Gwen. Arminus in particular was a reliable spot to catch something good. Spanish Horses brought a tight set to a packed crowd while Library Card rewarded relatively early risers with their 11.45 set which kicked Saturday off with power, urgent lyrics and pounding musical backing suggesting a kind of combination of PISS and Dry Cleaning. Meanwhile, the venue’s second stage up a winding staircase made for a more intimate setting which particularly suited mry’s dreamy and intricate slowcore and the tight interplay of Perfect Binding.

As ever, we leave Left of the Dial with a wealth of new names we are excited to hear more from in the coming years. That this is the norm they have established is not to be lessen its impressiveness. This is a true gem of a festival with an incredible hit rate of killer bookings across its sprawling lineups. The city itself made for a charming backdrop, a little less manic than other European centres and easily walkable – rain permitting. Where the sodden conditions forced us inside, there was always something to go and see, and when a break was needed, there were plenty of spots for beer and bitterballen to refuel. We left for the train on Sunday morning wishing the best to brothers-in-arms preparing for a stormy ferry trip back to England and already looking forward to getting back next year.