Artist: Jorn
Label: Frontiers Records
Release: 2007
Jorn Lande, as I always like to say, is one of the finest singers of the new-generation wave of melodic hard rock, a member of many bands who practically brawl over him whenever the guy puts himself forward for the vocalist spot, has apparently finally thrown himself fully into his solo career.
His latest studio effort “The Duke” (2006), which once again makes no secret of its great quality, has now been followed up by Jorn with the release of his first live album ever. It’s a double disc that captured on tape Jorn’s performance at the Prog Power Festival in Atlanta (USA) last year. Since Jorn wasn’t a headliner at the festival, his time on stage was capped at a good hour, so to fill out the running time the guy stuffed the second disc with a few studio bonus tracks, like Sacrificial Feelings, a freshly re-recorded Out To Every Nation and, of course, a new arrangement fusing the classics Lonely Is The World/Letters From Earth into one, which confirms the guy’s fondness for the Black Sabbath albums with Ronnie James Dio at the helm of the mic.
You don’t need any grand visionary to tell you this is top-notch stage execution of the material, with brilliant vocal acrobatics from this one-of-a-kind singer and excellent, constant communication among everyone on stage. Jorn is definitely in full bloom as a musician, and there’s no doubt about it when you put his live album “Live In America” between your headphones. The “Lojtrica domačih”-style medley of Whitesnake classics tears your ears off as if they were being sliced through at the hinges by a beam of the finest laser, so you don’t even realize when it happened. Jorn kills with his warmth and sensual glow as well as with devastating, eruptive outbursts; the man remains a powerhouse at what he does. He’s strongest and most distinctive in the mid vocal registers, and he shines there especially through that Coverdale-style erotic technique of singing verses on the exhale, which really glows in the quiet parts.
Everything would be great if we didn’t run into an element that pretty much wrecks the album’s appeal across the board. Jorn and company indulged in far too much soloing over the course of the show. His bandmates are nothing more than decent imitators of the standards set in the seventies. None of them has a stylistic identity that would let you recognize his unique character and artistic untouchability after just a few notes or a few bars of rhythm, as the building block of a singular charisma. Just as Jorn Lande is not David Coverdale, his drummer is not Cozy Powell and his guitarist is not Ritchie Blackmore. The guys have obviously forgotten that and robbed us of room for three or four more Jorn songs, which the guy could have sung live instead of those solo spots. You go to a Jorn Lande show with one basic aim: to hear Jorn! The solos are simply faceless and tediously executed. The drawn-out soloing of both guitars and the drums, in all its humorlessness, kills the whole concert atmosphere and the flow of this recording on the spot. That move smothers Jorn’s presence as the vocalist and central figure of the show, who loses his dominance here, along with the compact punch that the band never manages to build during the performance, and which this double live disc therefore fails to capture.
You’d kill for Jorn’s voice, but this time we have to resign ourselves to the fact that his faithful workhorses got top billing alongside him, and that this simply isn’t 100% Jorn Lande. A shame. A big shame, because we know how fantastic this singer is when he can unleash his full vocal voltage, which few singers of his generation can match today in their line of work. Let’s hope the guy quickly learns something useful from this mistake. This is simply too short a live recording to afford something like that. The solos wouldn’t be jabbing at your ears so annoyingly if we were looking at a running time of two hours. Still, in its entirety “Live In America” is the embodiment of punchy voltage and that characteristic Jorn energy, which fans of this singer will embrace without reservation, despite its imitation of the solo excursions found on the official live releases of the recent-history bands Whitesnake, Deep Purple, Rainbow and Dio, all of which are surely close to Jorn’s heart.
Line-up
Jorn Lande – vocals
Tore Moren – guitar
Lasse Finbraten – keyboards
Jorn Viggo Lofstad – guitar
Stian Kristoffersen – bass guitar
Willy Bendiksen – drums
Production
Jorn Lande & Jorn Viggo Lofstad
Tracklist
CD 1.:
1. We Brought The Angels Down
2. Blacksong
3. Duke Of Love
4. Are You Ready
5. Cold Sweat
6. Drum Solo
7. Out To Every Nation
8. Guitar Solo
9. Straight Through The Heart
CD 2.:
1. Godless And Wicked
2. Soulburn
3. Devilbird
4. Perfect Strangers
5. Gonna Find The Sun
6. Whitesnake Medley
7. Out To Every Nation
8. Lonely Is The Word/Letters From Earth
9. Sacrificial Feelings
