22-02-2012 Sunrise Avenue

Supports: Jim Korft; Venue: Tivoli de Helling, Utrecht (The Netherlands)
By: Sabine van Gameren

Sunrise Avenue would play a club show in The Netherlands for the first time today and when arriving at the venue there is a huge queue outside. It turns out that the majority of the people travelled from Germany for this show.

But before the Finnish guys would start, Jim Kroft enters the stage. He comes from Berlin (Germany) and plays quite mellow pop music. Accompanied with a fine band he sets a good show. What stands out are the drummer which is skilled in making the calmest moments exciting to stick along and the more powerful moments rich of direction. Next to Jim Kroft his own string skills, he has a fine guitarist along which pulls of some respect of the audience by being modest when needed and stepping forward to shine exactly when the time is there. Together they played a nice set which worked quite well. Obviously Sunrise Avenue has very dedicated fans that travel far for them, but as it seems that Jim Kroft entertained the audience as well this evening.

For Sunrise Avenue this may not have been the best evening, Vocalist Samu has some troubles with his voice and this was very noticeable in his set. He clearly could not show off his vocal range to its fullest. This, however, did not stop him from trying to give his all. With a little audience participation in the hit songs he quite gets away with it at most of the songs, what stage charisma can fix for you in such situations must never be underestimated. “Forever Yours” and “Fairytale Gone Bad” were chanted along, but the band also included a couple of long compilations of nowadays chart materials and hits from the past. Adele and Rihanna get easily combined with songs of Queen for example and even some reggae classics come along. Maybe for someone who is not that familiar with the band this may be a bit of a bummer, as the amount of material of their own is quite low compared to the covers, but the band does make an entertaining act to observe. The way their guitarist and the bassist are playing around with each other on stage is quite amusing, it surely radiates that they have fun in what they are doing. So even though this was probably not the best concert of the band ever, they still tried to make the best out of the situation and the audience seem to appreciate this.