To warm up the night, the Finnish up-and-comers Awake Again took over the stage. For the first band there was already a decent sized crowd there and the energy was immediately right. Being quite familiar with these guys by now, I knew we were in for quite the explosive set with catchy bangers and emotionally laden songs. Not too long ago, they finally released their debut full-length album ‘No Matter How The World Turns’ and of course we got quite some tracks from that album besides some of their earlier released individual singles. Secretly we were hoping to get to see Lena Scissorhands jump on stage with them for the track ‘Busy Doing Nothing’ on which she did guest vocals, but alas that didn’t happen. Nevertheless, it was yet again a great show from a band that deserves to become more known throughout the world. Of course, they had to round up the set with their Katy Perry cover ‘Dark Horse‘ much to the delight of the crowd. Simply a great band to get the temperature to a decent level for Infected Rain!

Last time I saw Infected Rain was at Tavastia as openers for Lacuna Coil and Eluveitie and back then I thought we just didn’t have enough time with this great band. With a headline show at On The Rocks, I was looking forward to getting that rectified. The venue filled up pretty much to the brim, automatically already rising the heat quite much even before they took the stage. Since they just released their new album ‘Ecdysis‘ earlier in the year, of course we could expect plenty of tracks from that album featured on the setlist, but first they opened with a great trio of songs of their 2 albums before with ‘Pendulum‘, ‘Mold‘ and ‘Black Gold‘, which immediately set the bar high on explosiveness. As usual, Lena drew in a lot of the attention, banging her bright orange dreads and simply being a great frontwoman constantly interacting with her fans. And yes, she slipped up a bit by calling out “What’s up Tallinn?”, but with all the intense touring, the room quickly forgave her once she realized the error a bit later. And backed with an incredibly talented band of musicians, who could hold on to any grudges for long? From the new album we got ‘Longing‘, ‘The Realm of Chaos‘, ‘Postmortem Pt. 1‘ and ‘Fighter‘ to enjoy live for the first time for many of us, and they wrapped up with fan favorites ‘Fool The Gravity’ and oldie ‘Sweet, Sweet Lies‘. A great club show, with plenty of moshpits and even a wall of death, in between all the summer festivals by an absolutely great and sometimes somewhat underrated band!