Photo Reports
The passage of the American Goodbye June in Munich happened in the middle of the week, on a Wednesday and it is always risky to predict the affluence of the public, in this case, the Strom club in Munich managed to fill up to watch a night of rock n roll in its pure state. The average age in the room is guaranteed to be around 40 which shows that this is not a show for “kids”!
Scarlet Rebels act as the opening band for the current headliner, they are a classic melodic rock n roll band from a small town in Wales and proudly announce their achievements in the UK charts. With two albums out, the band managed to convince and entertain the audience, showing their music with great quality and maturity on stage. They also had time to send political messages related to the current situation of the UK Prime Minister.
After a nice warm up, the band from Nashville came on stage, I confess that I didn’t know them until recently, but as soon as I heard their songs my memory took me to compare them with classic bands like AC/DC or Led Zeppelin, which is good! The band exists since 2009 and in this tour they will present their latest work, released this year, called “See Where The Night Goes”. When we see these youngsters live, we go back to the time when the stages were almost naked, without many props that could distract our senses. The show is raw and we are absorbed by the genuine rock spirit, where organic instruments are played and there is an artistic express emergency after this obligatory stop because of the pandemic. Goodbye June is a band that deserves to be heard by many people, to have success and to be experienced live, on stage the Americans show that they were made to play for the people, and if on record they are good, live they are excellent in everything they do.
In short, it was a great night of rock at the Strom in Munich and who missed it was only those who were not present!
The main day of Sauna Open Air started with the always good Mokoma. After that Melrose played on the smaller stage. Cyan Kicks gave us quite a big show. Reckless Love around frontman Olli mostly played us their new songs from Turborider. Luckily we had time to regain our breath during Graveyard.
We had just as much fun as Klamydia on stage while listening to them. Skid Row gave us their all with their fast passed songs. Massive Wagons were one of the most entertaining bands I’ve ever seen. Danko Jones spiked their show with a lot of humour and jokes. Hardcore Superstar gave us quite a party, before the day ended with an amazing show by In Flames.
Faun are one of the world’s leading bands fusing ancient sounds with modern music and have released 10 studio CDs and 2 DVDs in the meantime. Their CD releases reach top positions in the German album charts (e.g. “Midgard” #3, “Luna” #4). They have also been nominated three times for the Echo, Germany’s biggest music award, and achieved platinum status with their CD “Von den Elben” and gold status with their CD “Luna”.
Faun have played over 900 concerts worldwide and are currently touring with various concert programmes, including a seated, quieter programme for theaters, churches and concert halls (FAUN ACOUSTIC), a cultural programme for seated concert halls, classical and romantic summer concerts and a lively, unseated festival show.
Two years after it was originally announced, the Faun show finally took place on Friday July 8th, 2022 with a completely sold out capacity at the Munich based Circus Krone. It is one of the biggest circuses in Europe and one of the few in Western Europe (along with the Cirque d’hiver de Paris, Cirque d’hiver d’Amiens and Cirque Royal in Brussels) to occupy a building as well. Over the course of a century, Circus Krone Imperium has become recognised worldwide as an institution within the circus world. Its remarkable success was based on the maxim “entrepreneurial spirit, love for animals and absolute seriousness”. This maxim has been maintained throughout the illustrious history of the family that owned and operated Circus Krone.
To celebrate finally this union, the band prepared an extensive repertoire that stretched over almost 3 hours of performance, with an announced break (circus style), and later two encores showing that the night seemed to come out of a fairy tale. The show put together is simply worth seeing. Simplicity, refinement, good taste and a great show of light and sound, without any flaws helps Faun to consolidate the top level to which they belong, and the humility and genuineness with which they do their art deserves all the respect and admiration.
We would like to highlight and thank you for the excellent reception given to us at this event.
With better weather and more visitors, Day 2 of Sauna Open Air already started very nicely with Sister Sin. And the performances just got better as the day progressed. Dampf were a very pleasant surprise for me, while Doro is a legend that doesn’t even need to be introduced. Also Marko Hietala who filled in for the unfortunately sick Saxon is well known in the Finnish metal scene and a welcome sight back on a stage and Tampere’s very own Nyrkkitappelu brought punk to the fest. Avantasia unfortunately didn’t have all of there equipment, as it got lost on the airport and in combination with some technical problems their actual play time got reduced by quite a bit, but they still did there best to give us a good show. Swedish metalcore greats Dead by April were full of energy just as our beloved Finnish heavy metallers of Battle Beast were. The Irish punks of Stiff Little Fingers were a bit of a contrast to most of the rest of the program, but fun non the less. Five Finger Death Punch we sadly didn’t get to photograph but as you may expect, it was quite the explosive show from these popular Americans.
The crowd was ALIVE at the downtown Columbus, Ohio venue, Kemba Live, on this warm July night. Starset was the headliner with support from Red and Divide The Fall. Upon walking into the venue, we were immediately impressed. There was already a big crowd, which was so good to see! We made our way through the sea of people down to the pit, and anxiously waited for the first band to take the stage.
Day 1 of Sauna Open Air didn’t have the best weather yet, but that couldn’t stop us from having a good time. With bands like Fear of Domination, Alestorm, Beast in Black, Turmion Kätilöt and Bullet for my Valentine it’s pretty much impossible to not have fun. The new location also work quite nicely and offered everything necessary for a relaxed festival time. During Michael Monroe‘s show there weren’t that many people yet sadly, but it got quite full as the day progressed. I guess the first day being on a Thursday was a bit tricky for a lot of people to get there earlier. Overall there would be 22.000 people visiting the festival during the 3 days.
Swedish melodeath legends Dark Tranquillity and Finnish folk metal party gang Ensiferum joined forces and embarked on a huge European co-headlining tour during April and May. Adding to that a couple of promising bands to warm up the crowds, we knew this was a tour we couldn’t miss out on. So when they got to the Finnish shore for a couple of stops there, we made sure we were there at the Helsinki show on a sunny Sunday eve!
It’s like boiling hot in the venue, packed with excited sweaty people, on this summer sunday evening. Trash Boat is touring with great music and messages of love and tolerance. They seem to be having a lot of fun doing so. They make the ground shake and the crowd move. Excellent support act.
Like it isn’t already hot enough, when Enter Shikari enters the stage vocalist Roughton “Rou” Reynolds is wearing a green fur coat. Because of all the hyperactive movement on stage it didn’t take too long until he and drummer Rob Rolfe where both bare-chested. There were two rules for the show: love one another and dance like nobody’s watching. The crowd embraced those rules and had an amazing evening singing along to all the songs. It was a crazy evening with Rou, Chris and Rory performing in the middle of a circle pit and bassist Chris Batten jumping from the speakers.
Shaman’s Harvest and Crobot with special guests Any Given Sin and Hell Came Home absolutely raised the roof on Thursday June 9th, 2022 at Rockstar Lounge in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Four awesome bands each with their own style and genre lit the stage up with a banger of show.
Right after an already exhausting Tuska 2022, I couldn’t help to go on the road again to catch one of the shows of the Ukranian folktronica sensation Go_A at On The Rocks in Helsinki. Like most, having caught on to this project after their participation in Eurovision 2021 with ‘Shum’, I had been looking forward to possibly catching them live and now finally the time was there. And I was not disappointed! Not only was the music incredible live, the overall atmosphere of love and togetherness that permeated everything at the venue, including hugs between vocalist Kateryna Pavlenko and the crowd, and the regular show of support for the struggles of the band’s home country made this a show to not forget any time soon!
