Dockville Festival @ Wilhelmsburg, Hamburg

Perhaps to get the true festival spirit we now have to travel to Hamburg. Or to be more specific Wilhelmsburg, the city’s sometimes overlooked harbour island and Dockville festival’s home since 2007.

Wilhelmburg is a socio-economically diverse place, and with an atmospheric site in which reclaimed industrial land nuzzles with nature and an increasing number of big hitting international artists alongside homegrown German music, the festival continues to raise the area’s profile. Shh! Don’t say it’s the new Berlin.

FRIDAY

For day one, heavy rain has brought with it primordial mud - but there’s still a communal atmosphere. Don’t disturb that activist in a hammock!

A look through the bill reveals some strange names, including an exceedingly strange one in Berlin’s Herpes. Nevertheless, their impression of early Joy Division somehow embodies rock ‘n roll’s spirit.

Then in a tent Camera (also from Berlin) crystallize kosmiche with motorik drumming and a surging sound, helped out on guitar by none other than krautrock legend Michael Rother (Neu). Another German music figurehead, Dieter Moebius (of Cluster) then seems to recreate the entire big bang with just a couple of keyboards, sounding blissful in a sylvan glade, before Egotronic bring sheer bombast and politically charged electro New Deutsch Wave on the second stage.

Headliners Editors then play with skin shedding intensity on main stage, with songs like ‘Smokers Outside the Hospital’ undeniably bringing the day to a satisfactorily moody end.

SATURDAY

Thankfully full of bright sunshine, day two has that accessible festival vibe, with some choice programming bringing refreshing sounds from around the world, getting off to a storming start with Denmark’s Keller Mensch, whose electrifying, electric-violin enhanced sound joins the dots between the Bad Seeds and Rocket From The Crypt.

Hamburg's Video Club find the space in which world music detours into new wave. With tingling African guitar in some snappy songs illuminated by techno ambience they’re a real discovery, a vivid snapshot to the musical zeitgeist where if anything’s good, it sticks, with some reminiscence to Foals and early Bombay Bicycle Club.

Sweden’s Battlekat will bring inevitable comparisons with The Knife, but that’s a positive comparison with their singer’s remarkable vocal range and they have some really nasty EBM bass frequencies of their own which persuade a whole packed crowd into dancing (and any group who play what appears to be an electronic breathalyser will of course always be distinguishable).

Crystal Castles really make sense in a German field, their 8 bit punk having affinities with New Deutsch Wave. Alice Glass plays the distressed haus frau to perfection too. Later, London duo SBTRKT seamlessly blend a myriad styles including house, techno and two step - thy feel like the latest soulfully vocalised evolution in UK urban music.

Finishing off, Mount Kimbie take a pinch of glacial Radiohead electronica and add this to cavernous dubstep grooves. Both cerebral and danceable, with their resemblance to knob twiddling nerds, viola, nerdstep anyone?

SUNDAY

The rain’s back for the final day but the music’s not to be beaten. In the case of Vinnie Who, they literally chase the rain away with irresistible pop. They’re young and from Denmark but the songs resemble a '70s soul disco explosion. Berlin’s A Forest then sober things up a touch with haunting electronica which also makes sense of a name taken from a Cure song. The way in which barely exhaled male and female vocals combine almost as one instrument also is reminiscent of The XX and most impressive.

It's only left for Pains of Being Pure at Heart to provide a festival stealing finale with a set of overdriven fuzz pop perfection, although with encroaching rain there’s a danger one of them could die in a bizarre fuzz pedal accident.

If Dockville continues to provide such refreshingly varied line up’s it should become a European festival fixture. Only the mud really sucked.