Like many others, I came into Eclipse because of the melodic rock supergroup, W.E.T. The "E" in W.E.T. pertains to the band Eclipse and away we go. Out of the three bands that gained notoriety from being involved in the supergroup, Eclipse was always the hardest hitting. They had two highly skilled guitarists, riffs, solos, a more aggressive edge to their sound and lyrics, and they released two extremely worthy albums in Bleed And Scream and Armageddonize. However, here is where things began to take a downhill turn. Erik, singer and guitarist of Eclipse was soon drafted to write the next W.E.T. album as well as doing two albums with singer Ronnie Atkins under the name of Nordic Union. While doing these projects, he also wrote two Eclipse albums in this timeframe. It is my opinion that Erik either got burnt out, got stretched thin in terms of ideas, or he just kinda snapped and went in a completely different direction.

For one, Erik stopped playing Kramer guitars and switched to giant semi / hollow body Gretsch guitars. Now, I'm not one to begrudge someone playing a guitar that's not the "right fit" for a certain genre but this change in guitars also brought a change in sound. Riffs began to fall towards the wayside and emphasis began to be only on the song's chorus. Worse than that, the lyrics have become god awful. Where once Eclipse sang about ancient battlefields, terrorist bombings, being a black sheep, now they sing literal cliche phrases and babble about "Saturday Night" like some bro country band. Musically, there has also been a sharp decline in the riffs. There are no riffs. What we have instead are a bunch of chord stabbings and simple chug rhythms. Again, this basically lends all the melodic leaning onto the chorus. Things are pretty bad. Roses On Your Grave literally has a chorus that is, "only the good, the good die young." Whether it's Iron Maiden, Billy Joel, Black Sabbath or just the fact that's a common saying in general is grounds for a lyrical reprimand. Worse yet is Dying Breed quoting Lemmy. "Born to lose, live to win?" Come the fuck on guys. Was this self produced? Did no one raise their hand at all in the entire recording, mixing, listening of this album and say, "Erik, dawg, these lyrics fucking suck."? Eclipse used to be such a great band but this is generic as generic schlock gets. Saturday Night (Hallelujah) is something that would never have been on Bleed And Scream or Armageddonize. While Runaways was rather commercial since they wrote it for some Eurovision type contest, Saturday Night (Hallelujah) is just straight up sell out rock. The rest of the album almost gets to the point where it's as good as the worst of Armageddonize.

I'm not trying to completely shit all over Erik here, this type of thing has happened before. Anyone remember Magnus Karlson? He wrote the really bad ass debut Allen / Lande album and based on the melodic rock success of that he was drafted to write everyone's album for the next ten years. He wrote more Allen / Lande's, a Bob Catley album or two, a solo album, and a few more I think I'm missing. The point is, is that despite his ability to seemingly churn out melodic rock successes, he eventually wore the well dry and just joined Primal Fear. Maybe Erik needs to hang back a bit and concentrate on Eclipse and not worry too much about commercial sounding side projects.