...Sauna Open Air, that is. If you've read our Sauna Open Air 2010 report, you may have noticed that I wrote about us heading to Jack The Rooster after the Kiss show, and that being "another story". Well, here's that story. With the last notes of "Rock & Roll All Nite" still ringing in our heads, we took a nice walk in the warm summer night to Jack The Rooster, a club that has left its' mark on the Tampere rock scene during the last couple of years. There were two bands performing there in the official "afterparty" of Sauna Open Air, one of them a Kiss tribute band Kissin' Time and the other Reckless Love. Since the release of their debut album earlier this year, Reckless Love have toured around the country and abroad too, and each one of their live shows has converted new fans for them. Before this gig, we had only managed to see a short in-store performance by the band, but even that was enough to really look forward to seeing them in another location. Jack The Rooster is a cool club with fine looking interior, but as a live place for a band like Reckless Love it's way too small. The band's gear was crammed to a stage in the corner of one of the club's rooms, and it didn't seem like the kind of place where one could put on a good show. Against all odds, that's just what the band did. They had very limited space and not much of a light show, but it didn't matter, the band rocked the house and got up, close and personal with their fans. It's a pity that only a part of the crowd were able to actually see the band though.
The band's set consisted of the debut album in its' entirety, a single B-side called "Get Electric" and a cover of Van Halen's "Panama". The album's material sounded fine, even the the tracks that I didn't really love on the CD worked pretty well on stage. "Get Electric" is a good song too and could've just as well made it to the album tracklisting, while the band's version of "Panama" is a good one too, with Pepe showing some cool Eddie Van Halen tricks he's got up his sleeve.
Vocalist Olli is a natural showman and he's got plenty of that "star quality", yet he seems kind of down-to-earth. His show antics owe a lot the great frontmen of rock, especially to David Lee Roth and Michael Monroe, with high kicks and dramatically torn t-shirts, but who cares? I've seen enough boring live bands who have little or no stage presence, it's always much more fun to watch a band that actually puts a little effort into it.
Showmanship or not, to make it a complete package a band needs good songs, and Reckless Love have plenty of 'em. Each one of their songs is blessed with a singalong chorus, and most of the crowd at Jack The Rooster indeed sang along. Set highlights included the single hits "One More Time", "Romance" and "Beautiful Bomb", but pretty much every song got a great reception. Olli also pleaded guilty to stealing "everything but the chords and the melody" from the band that had played at Sauna a couple of hours ago... the RL song he was talking about is "Back To Paradise", their "tribute to "I Was Made For Lovin' You" by Kiss. If there's another single release planned, I have a feeling that it might be this song. What else? Well, the already infamous "there goes the shirt"-trick got the frontrow wild, with the girls (and I believe even some guys) trying to catch that shirt. They really had no chance, since the "fangirl" inside our photographer suddenly woke up and with the speed of a cobra she grabbed that piece of fabric. Okay... We didn't stick around for Kissin' Time, but our sources who did said that they were really good. Review by Kimmo Toivonen |
