Reviews
2005-08-04
Second To None is the new album that the Swedish band Eclipse released. All Eclipse's band members hail from Stockholm and they are Erik Martensson on vocals, Magnus Henriksson the guitar player, Magnus Ulfstedt is the drummer and Fredrik Folkare the bass player. Mats Olausson, the keyboard player, is a guest here, and you can notice a work next to Yngwie Malmsteen in his resume. The Band is all about melodic hard rock, and it has been this way since they were formed in1999. On their second album, Second To None, Eclipse are giving up on keyboards almost entirely, and this may come as a surprise, seeing that their debut album featured a lot of keyboards. However, there's no giving on the topics, as Martensson continues to write on romantic matters, some of them come from first hand experience. The composing is mostly the work of Magnus Henriksson, the guitar player, and all band members contributed to the production.
The album runs by you real nicely. Musically speaking you can hear some really nice upbeat sounds, and although there are a few impressive solos like in Nothing Between Us, there are no complicated riffs or unnecessary passages. The sounds that go along with the singing is often reminiscent of Europe or Van Halen but you can expect that. After all, you gotta have some sort of a musical inspiration to start from in the quest for your uniqueness. The voice of Martensson is often reminiscent in the up-tempo songs like Streets Of Gold the voice of Joey Tempest from Europe(a Swedish brotherhood, perhaps?), and on some of the mid-tempo songs like Light Of Day he's often very much alike bon jovi's or the black crows' voice, but for those of you who look for that uniqueness, there are two slow and touching ballads on this album, I'll Ask For You and Better World. I really couldn't find any resemblance to anything I know in those songs.
The album is really fun to hear in all kinds of situations – when you want to rock or when you want to mellow out with guitar-featured ballads in the background – it contains them all in a small eleven-song package spread over forty minutes.
Nir Haviv
