Hard Rock Café, April 2

Not many rock sites are as well known as Hard Rock Café. Stockholm’s very own Hard Rock were visited by Swedish melodic hard rockers ECLIPSE at their release party on the 2nd of April, as their 2nd outing “Second To None” was launched.

After a long and tiring week at work I hoped they would be performing on time, but of course it's hard rock and it just has to be delayed. So after having waited and waited, I had to find myself a chair instead of standing in the crowd. The good thing was I found a few good friends who had an extra chair just to the left of the scene! Talk about a good view.

ECLIPSE played songs from both their CD's, however more songs from the new piece of plastic, naturally. “Streets of gold” and “Second to none” were good examples of the band’s high quality, and they are doing very well live. Erik Mårtensson¹s lead vocal is real strong, even though the band¹s sound was hard to determine from my “left side point of view”. All members are good players, and especially guitar player Magnus Henriksson is well worth being mentioned. Great melodies and an enormous amount of feeling. The most exciting moment during the show was probably when a person right next to me, started headbanging in front of the excellent keyboard player Anders Berlin. It looked like he knew the guys in the band, but I¹m not sure. Apparently he¹d been having a few too many beers, and all of a sudden he bumped into the keyboard rack and one keyboard fell off. Luckily Anders Berlin was really alert and saved his keyboard from a sudden death Rock ’n’ Roll is always rock ‘n’ roll!

Hard Rock Café was full of people this night, and I think ECLIPSE gained a few new fans. People came by car from over 3 hours drive away to see them!

They performed real well and they¹ve also found something of their own style on this new CD. Rock on, dudes.

Ola Gränshagen

Comments from Erik Mårtensson – Singer of Eclipse

We had a fantastic night at the Hard Rock Cafe! The place was packed and the response from our fans was awesome. It actually was quite a hard day for the band since we had to get up at 5 am to go to Rockklassiker 106,7 (Rock Classics), a radio station in Stockholm, to perform 2 songs live in the studio and do interviews. The radio host is no one less than Europe’s crazy drummer Ian Haugland. But despite the early morning we managed to stay awake all night and the entire evening and the release party was a blast. It inspire us to work even harder as a band and hopefully we will go out on tour later this year.

Eclipse website: www.eclipsemania.com