Location: Trezzo sull’Adda (Milan) / Live Club / Italy
Date: Friday, May 1, 2014
Months of dithering over whether to go to the festival or not melted away on the first day of May 2014 into a five-hour trip to Lombardy, specifically the ancient Italian town of Trezzo sull’Adda, a stone’s throw from Milan, where Frontiers Rock festival was calling. Modeled on Britain’s Firefest, this three-day event brought together some of the hottest names in melodic rock, AOR and hard rock in one single spot in the heart of the Old Continent.
With such a specific lineup, the festival drew connoisseurs from far and wide. In the parking lot in front of the club you could spot license plates from France, Switzerland, Germany, even Poland and the Netherlands. And of course it wouldn’t have been the real deal without bumping into our friendly crew from Croatia, whom we’ve been running into all over Europe for years: whether it’s Y&T in Munich, Accept in Vienna or Scorpions in Bratislava! Gig addiction is a serious thing. You keep meeting the same faces no matter how many hundreds of kilometers you’ve driven in one direction or another, and despite the hefty financial hit, every single time all the worries and hassles are outweighed by the frank realization that musical romance is still alive. Here and now. Frontiers Rock festival was packed!
After checking in at a nearby private guesthouse, our four-person Rockline crew made a beeline for the club, which holds a good thousand people and was already nicely filled by three in the afternoon. In general, one of the pleasant things about the festival across all three days was how faithfully the crowd followed all the acts (not just the biggest names) from the afternoon onward.
As we walked into the hall, State of Salazar were already warming up on stage, a young Swedish band that became an instant underground sensation among melodic rock fans with their 2012 EP “Lost My Way”. State of Salazar bet on a classic AOR language with plenty of vocal harmonies and light guitar and keyboard accompaniment, so comparisons to the classic Survivor or Toto are more than fitting. Vocalist Marcus Nygren named the latter as his big musical idols in one of his stage announcements. Like Toto, State of Salazar aren’t flashy performers: unlike most similar younger Scandinavian outfits, they put their energy into a perfectionist delivery of the material rather than explosive stage acrobatics, and there were even goosebumps here and there during the textbook-perfect choruses! The opening act of the festival already offered a pleasant surprise. Clearly, finding a home under the Frontiers label is proof in itself that you don’t have to worry about quality even with the lesser-known names!
Up second were Dalton, another representative of the Swedish rock school, but cut from a completely different cloth than the guys who played before them. The band’s history goes back three decades, to the mid-eighties, when drummer Mats Dahlberg left Treat and gathered a new crew around him. Dalton were born! In the second half of the eighties they released two albums that are now classics, before vanishing into the dustbin of history. They only got back together recently, playing in Sandviken, Sweden as Scorpions’ support act after two decades of inactivity. They’re now working on their third album, so playing in front of a nicely packed club of melodic rock fans in Italy came in handy for gathering motivation during the grueling album-making process. Dalton served up their classic material, including their biggest hit You’re Not My Lover (But You Were Last Night), which was gifted to the band by songwriters Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora and Desmond Child. The long absence from the stage showed, as the performance wasn’t flawless, but the Swedish veterans still pulled it off compactly and confidently enough to get the hall singing along and cheering them on without any trouble. Dalton shows are a real rarity, so for most of those present, catching them was like slotting one more missing piece into the mosaic of half-forgotten melodic rock heritage they’d already seen.
Sports fans hear the name Three Lions and think of the English national football team, which has carried that nickname for decades. But it’s also the name taken by a new British band made up of AOR scene veterans. Guitarist Vinny Burns (Dare, Ten, Asia), drummer Greg Morgan (Dare, Ten) and big-stage newcomer Nigel Bailey on vocals and bass played their first-ever concert at the festival, so their knees were still knocking at the start, but their wealth of experience helped them catch their breath quickly. In a forty-minute set, Three Lions walked through their debut, released two weeks before the festival, which treads the thin line between the sound of classic eighties British AOR (Ten, Airrace) and the kind of classic guitar-driven rock you’d get from Thin Lizzy or the legendary UFO. Despite the minimalist approach of the basic trio, Three Lions filled out the sound nicely and squeezed as much as they could out of the melodic hooks even in the verses, mostly thanks to Nigel Bailey’s velvety voice. A solid show, but for an even higher grade the trio of British Lions lacked a bit more heart.
Snakecharmer are a band that will especially please fans of the classic Whitesnake sound, meaning their legacy up to and including the album “Slide It In” (1984), before the Whitesnake camp got swept up in the wind of big hair and the California rock tradition of the eighties. How could they not, when the core of the band is two musical heavyweights, former Whitesnake guitarist Micky Moody and bassist Neil Murray (ex-Whitesnake, ex-Black Sabbath), joined by keyboardist Adam Wakeman (son of Yes man Rick Wakeman), vocalist Chris Ousey, guitarist Laurie Wisefield and drummer Harry James. Snakecharmer released their self-titled debut last year, and presenting it was the thread running through the show. Snakecharmer wade through a classic rock sound, mostly thanks to Mr. Wakeman’s fingers gliding over the Hammond keys, while the clean vocals of former Heartland frontman Ousey, who also reaches for the higher registers, are what mark the band as part of the melodic rock fold. So Snakecharmer is a blend of two different schools of rock, and the result is an effective dose of rock goodness, more than worthy of the eminent names on stage. Snakecharmer built most of the set from their own material, with Guilty as Charged, the punchy single Accident Prone and My Angel all making an appearance. But since Snakecharmer can’t possibly escape the shadow of their past, a few Whitesnake hits had to be there too. If Slow an’ Easy was a pleasant change of pace, especially since David Coverdale and company haven’t played it on any Whitesnake tour in years, picking the pop hit Here I Go Again was far from it. But that’s how it goes: satisfying the appetites of the wider crowd has always taken priority over gourmet taste as such. Despite that remark, Snakecharmer fully and credibly lived up to their eminent name this afternoon.
One of the more interesting names on the first day of the festival was W.E.T., a kind of Swedish melodic rock supergroup, since its core is made up of members of Work of Art, Eclipse and Talisman (the band’s name comes from the initials of those groups). Creative leaders Robert Sall and Eric Martensson founded the project to combine their individual takes on 21st-century AOR, after the debut albums of their two parent bands made them both prominent figures in the Scandinavian melodic revival in 2008. They also lured in the famous vocalist Jeff Scott Soto. W.E.T. made good use of the favorable late-afternoon slot and proved they weren’t put there for nothing! The Swedes cultivate a sophisticated, all-encompassing interplay between guitar and keyboards, and the lead vocal fits into the overall lines rather than coming alive in all its glory, so Soto couldn’t really slip into his trademark persona of the energetic, kinetic, hyperactive frontman either. W.E.T. thus work on stage as an equal team, keeping the audience in check with dynamic arrangements for the whole running time. On top of that, the young crew of Swedish musicians swear by perfectionism in execution, so they easily pulled the maximum out of every song. Midway through the show, Soto also paid tribute with a stretched-out banner to his good friend Marcel Jacob, founder of Talisman, who died far too young. A pleasant and likable set, though it later turned out that both Martensson (Eclipse) and Soto were still hiding their biggest aces up their sleeves!
The story of Hardline is a fascinating one. After only a pale shadow of the old lineup remained, and even the third album “Leaving The End Open” (2009) failed to satisfy the demanding appetites, the band was clinically dead. It was pulled out of its slumber by Italian keyboardist and one of Frontiers’ show ponies, Alessandro Del Vecchio. Del Vecchio wrote a few songs and offered them to Johnny Gioeli, the vocalist and the only remaining original member of Hardline. He was thrilled with them, the album “Danger Zone” was born, and Hardline stepped toward a new chapter of their existence, even though many (rightly) wonder about the credibility of today’s version of the band.
Even though Gioeli is surrounded by an experienced crew of musicians who know exactly what they’re doing on stage, given the circumstances Hardline are these days more a Frontiers project being kept alive than a tight unit that breathes for one another. That still didn’t stop Hardline from delivering one of the most energetic shows of the entire festival, resting mainly on the shoulders of frontman Johnny Gioeli. In Axel Rudi Pell, where Gioeli has been working for more than fifteen years, his vocal and stage performance remain underused, but with Hardline the story is completely different! Gioeli put on a high-octane show and made the huge stage completely his own. There wasn’t a moment when he held back on energy, even on the vocally demanding songs like the classic Everything or the closing Rhythm from a Red Car. Gioeli also gave plenty of room to maneuver to his bandmates: in the solo spots, keyboardist Del Vecchio, Puerto Rican-rooted guitarist Josh Ramos and drummer Francesco Jovino all showed off their varied skills. Lubricated by plenty of experience, Hardline ran through all four studio albums in full swing and with remarkable ease, with the loudest cheers understandably going to the songs from the legendary debut “Double Eclipse”. The stage was breathing with full lungs, and down in the crowd heartbeats shot through the roof during the hit Hot Cherie. So the charm and essence of the band are still there, despite the bitter aftertaste around their credibility. The question is whether we’ll ever get to see Hardline live again!
The role of the day’s headliners fell to the Americans Tesla, who stormed into Europe solely for the Frontiers festival! The desire to please the label that’s responsible for their return to the hard rock map was clearly big. So, judging by what I saw, was the joy of the organizers, dancing on the far right side of the stage, where they swapped jokey gestures and grins with the band members the whole time Tesla were up there. A bit too conspicuous for my taste, even.
Tesla played Italy right before the release of their long-awaited new album “Simplicity”, so alongside the older hits, two brand-new songs, MP3 (Too Much Technology) and Ricochet, came to life in a live setting on European soil for the very first time. This is a band that has never been afraid of new challenges! Tesla know no concert breaks. Playing regularly (mostly all over their home country) has chiseled them into a real live machine, with volleys coming from every direction. First and foremost there’s the likable frontman Jeff Keith, with his unique timbre and throaty vocals, which can be the biggest nuisance of all when it comes to getting into Tesla. If you fall for Keith’s vocal performance, a Tesla show becomes one big pleasure, because his singing, matching the powerful riff figures on stage, doesn’t lose even a shred of its edge compared to the studio originals! The guitar acrobatics of the band’s lead string-slinger Frank Hannon added that recognizable Tesla juice to the songs live, and his moves (including playing the guitar behind his back) drew huge cheers in the hall. Even though in recent years he’s been flirting with blues and country as a solo artist, his hard rock vein still pulses with full awareness.
After the opening classics Hang Tough and Heaven’s Trail (Now Way Out), the Americans tossed in Mama’s Fool from the album “Bust a Nut” (1994), and the very next song, Into The Now, with its trademark catchy chorus, judging by the reaction has long since earned a spot among the favorites of the band’s audience, despite being newer material. The other guitarist, Dave Rude, a member of the outfit since 2006, also showed off a few solo expeditions and so took over the stage spotlight for at least a few moments, though the show mostly rested on Jeff Keith’s fiery stage presence. Tesla’s endless mileage let the five on stage play with confidence, and compared with, say, Stryper a day later, there were none of the empty or even pathetic stage speeches that so often “adorn” rock giants used to playing regularly. The mighty ballad Love Song announced that the concert was heading into its final stretch, in which Tesla also served up two punchy songs from the debut “Mechanical Resonanse” (1986), Modern Day Cowboy and Little Suzi. The sound was crystal clear, the guitar and vocal harmonies plainly audible, the volume cranked up to ear-splitting heights, so the last live experience of the night rattled every single bone in my body. The minutes flew by in a flash, and Tesla wrapped up with the obligatory encore, Cumin’ Atcha Live.
If I may add a personal note: after years of waiting, seeing Tesla again finally made it happen, even though I’d have loved to hear at least a few more songs than the “modest” thirteen. Tesla, Rockline is already looking forward to your next European club tour!
author: Urban Bolta
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
THREE LIONS:
1. Hold Me Down
2. Twisted Soul
3. Kathmandu
4. Don’t Let Me Fall
5. Hellfire Highway
6. Trouble In A Red Dress
SNAKECHARMER:
1. Guilty as Charged
2. A Little Rock & Roll
3. Accident Prone
4. Falling Leaves
5. Moody’s Blues
6. Slow an’ Easy (Whitesnake)
7. My Angel
8. Here I Go Again (Whitesnake)
9. Fool for Your Loving (Whitesnake)
W.E.T.:
1. Walk Away
2. Learn to Live Again
3. Invincible
4. Love Heals
5. Rise Up
6. Bad Boy
7. Still Unbroken
8. Broken Wings
9. If I Fall
10. Comes Down Like Rain
11. Brothers in Arms
12. One Love
HARDLINE:
1. Danger Zone
2. Takin’ Me Down
3. Everything
4. Fever Dreams
5. Dr. Love
6. In This Moment
7. Keyboard Solo
8. Voices
9. Drum Solo
10. Life’s a Bitch
11. In the Hands of Time
12. Guitar Solo
13. Hot Cherie
14. Rhythm from a Red Car
TESLA:
1. I Wanna Live
2. Hang Tough
3. Heaven’s Trail (No Way Out)
4. Mama’s Fool
5. Into the Now
6. MP3 (Too Much Technology)
7. Ricochet
8. What You Give
9. Love Song
10. Signs (Five Man Electrical Band)
11. Modern Day Cowboy
12. Little Suzi (Ph.D.)
—encore—
13. Cumin’ Atcha Live
