Fortunately Het Patronaat had quite a turn up to see Rival Sons. I have witnessed it a few times that the venue was just a bit too empty during various other concerts that I have seen there. I have to compliment the people in charge of the programming by the way to get such an up and coming band to Haarlem. They were very well suited for this kind of venue!

 

The show immediately kicked off with an uptempo song, ‘You Want To’, from their Head Down album; an excellent song to strut their stuff. This song gives a lot of room for singer Jay Buchanan to show what his worth. After the first few high longstretched notes that came out of his throat, I just stood there being amazed. What the hell?!? I thought he was excellent on disc, but this was out of this world. Personally I have never witnessed a better vocalist at any of the gigs I have went to. What a voice! Other thing that was apparent directly is the strange hand and head movements of Jay. Since I have never witnessed a Rival Sons concert before, I’m not sure if it is part of his stage antics or that he has found some pure mother nature delight in the center of Haarlem. It was entertaining though.

 

The pedal stuck to the metal with the following songs only to be released a bit with ‘Memphis Sun’ of their debut album. It seemed that the crowd wasn’t really familiar with this “oldie” if I compare the crowd’s reaction to this song in comparison to newer songs of Head Down. Same goes for the reaction to a slower song as ‘Torture’ from the self titled EP. Especially the drummer tried to get the crowd involved with the humming part on this song, but it failed measurably and left a bit of pitiful sight.

 

Luckily they took revenge by excellent versions of ‘All The Way’, ‘Until The Sun Comes’ and a beautiful version of ‘Jordan’. Especially on the last song Jay showed his skills. From that point on it was a complete victory. They ended the show with an encore which consisted of ‘Burn Down Los Angeles’ and ‘Soul’. Personally I would have liked them to switch both songs with each other, so they could end with a bang.

 

I witnessed an excellent concert with a band in good shape and a crowd loving it. The sound was very clear and I was again very pleased that they still serve bottled beer in Het Patronaat instead of those filthy plastic cups. There were only winners Wednesday night!