With weather warnings, red alerts, and temperatures up to 40℃ all in place, festivals and events get cancelled left, right, and centre here in The Netherlands today. Not Jera on Air, though. After taking what they’d consider sufficient measurements against the heat yesterday, the organisers have decided to continue ploughing on through the soaring heat and let the festival run as normal. Bar the occasional re-schedule or deviation from the original plan, Jera on Air is still going strong, though Jam of Today isn’t quite taking it as strong as of yet. We’ve quite enjoyed popping down the festival quite late during the day yesterday so we decided to do the same today. At the time of writing, we’re nearing the hottest moment of the day so we probably won’t be going out for at least another 4 hours or so.

About yesterday. It must’ve been about 20:30 as we finally set foot on the terrain, right on time to catch the tail of Alexisonfire’s set. As we drove up to the festival, we spun ‘This Could Be Anywhere in the World‘ and ‘Young Cardinals’, which happened to be the only two songs we actually managed to see them play live. Ha! Talk about great timing. After catching up with our struggling mates who just about survived setting up camp by the skin of their teeth (bless ’em!), we moved on via some good ol’ hardcore to end the night at 1am with a bit of Basement, and a struggling Sam Carter and his band Architects. The acclaimed metalcore group gave a decently regular performance but its front man was obviously struggling to keep his voice intact, more often than not failing to hit the right notes. Since Basement and Architects were both headlining their own stages respectively, we chose to check out a little bit of both but looking back at both band’s set lists today, we probably should’ve stayed a bit longer at the former. You win some, you lose some.

In chronological order, all acts as seen by Jam of Today on Jera on Air’s Thursday:
– Alexisonfire (…but literally only managed to catch two songs so can you even really count that?)
– Madball
– Trivium
– Converge
– Basement
– Architects