Jax Live The Life You Love Review
Jax
Live The Life You Love
FNA Records
2026
Back in the day, I spent a lot of time tape trading with folks I'd find in the back pages of magazines. Looking back, that's probably why my taste in music is all over the map and why I know so many bands that most people have never even heard of. If you were there, you know the thrill of getting a padded envelope in the mail full of dubbed cassettes from halfway across the country, or halfway around the world.
One of those tapes arrived in 1991. It was Jax's independently released album “New York”, and I remember thinking it was a damn good Hard Rock record. After that, I kept an eye out for the band. I'd dig through record stores hoping to find another release or thumb through magazines looking for an article, but the timing couldn't have been worse. The musical landscape shifted almost overnight, Grunge took over, and somewhere along the way I simply forgot about Jax.
Thankfully, FNA Records didn't. A few years back, the label resurrected the album under the title “Half-Cocked and Fully Loaded”, and now they've brought it back once again as “Live The Life You Love”. This latest edition sweetens the deal with three bonus tracks from vocalist Thom Jack's solo career, giving longtime fans another reason to revisit an album that deserved far more attention than it ever received.
The band's story is enough to make any Hard Rock fan shake their head. Jax was signed by CBS Records in Germany to release what eventually became “New York”, but the New York offices reportedly weren't too thrilled that their German counterparts had signed the band first. Office politics got in the way, the deal unraveled, and Jax was left twisting in the wind. Then the '90s arrived.
We all know how that story ends. Hard Rock bands were being dropped left and right, careers evaporated overnight, and countless albums were buried before they ever had a real chance. Jax was just one of many casualties. To this day, I'll never understand it. There were so many talented bands shown the door in favor of a movement that, while it certainly had its moments, left a mountain of great Hard Rock records collecting dust.
Thankfully, releases like this help correct a little of that history. As for “Live The Life You Love”, outside of a slightly revised track list and the addition of Thom Jack's solo material, it doesn't stray too far from “Half-Cocked and Fully Loaded”. That's perfectly fine with me because the songs were already strong enough to stand on their own.
If you've never heard Jax before, expect polished late-'80s Hard Rock with plenty of melody and hooks. I wouldn't lump them in with the Hair Metal or Sleaze crowd, and they definitely don't carry that Southern Hard Rock swagger. Instead, I hear flashes of KISS, Keel, and the party-ready energy of the David Lee Roth-era Van Halen. Not every song is equally polished, but the band's personality carries the album from beginning to end, and that's ultimately what matters.
For me, though, the real prize is the three Thom Jack solo tracks.
They're a little more AOR-oriented, they fit surprisingly well alongside the original material, and perhaps most importantly, they're something I'd never heard before. Whenever a reissue manages to offer longtime fans something genuinely new instead of simply re-packaging the same album again, I'm all for it.
That's exactly what FNA has done here. If you're a fan of melodic Hard Rock and missed Jax the first time around, as most people unfortunately did, this is the version to own. It's another reminder that the late '80s produced far more great bands than history gives it credit for, and every now and then it's nice to see one of those forgotten names get another shot at the spotlight.
Some records deserve a second chance. Jax has now had three. And if you've never heard them before, now's the perfect time to find out what so many of us tape traders were so excited about all those years ago.
Standouts – “Wish I Could Believe”, “Shine On My Halo”, “Don’t Let Them Get You Down”, “Hot So Hot”, “Danger Zone” and “Your Mama Don’t Hafta Know”.