Are You Ready to Rock

Swedish AOR hounds turned heavy metal part-timers Eclipse have always been something of a curiosity, at least from the metal head's perspective. Though they originally cut their teeth on a more late-80s Guns 'N' Roses meets Def Leppard stylistic niche in the early 2000s, their subsequent tenure with Frontiers Records has seen them inching closer to something more palpable to the metal world, spearheaded by a greater affinity for the iconic metal stylings of Dio, Ozzy Osbourne and a number of heavier contemporaries from the early to mid-1980s. Combined with a production quality that was similarly inching closer to the sort of highly compressed, louder than life sound with a sweetened melodic gloss that one comes to expect from a 2010s era Pretty Maids album, by the time Eclipse was approaching the 2010s, their metal credentials were beginning to show.

To be clear, this outfits full on debut into the world of heavy metal wouldn't occur until 2012's Bleed & Scream, but its immediate predecessor Are You Ready To Rock splits the difference between the band's AOR-obsessed past and their heavier future that it practically qualifies as a prequel to the former. The pacing of the album definitely leans towards the faster end of things, to the point that if one were to qualify this as a hard rock album, it would have to be put in its own sort of speed rock sub-genre niche given its swifter and more aggressive character when measured against the typical rock of the day. Vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Erik Mårtensson delivers a performance that is notably grittier than his usual fair, and his bass work gets fairly fancy (see the little shred session that closes out the opening anthem "Breaking My Heart Again"), which when combined with the wild 6-string work of Magnus Henriksson reveals a set of songs fairly similar to what Ozzy and Randy Rhoads were cranking out in the early 80s.

Song for song, this is one of those albums that equally weighs each individual part of the whole, resulting in a series of sonic chapters that are fairly similar sounding, but also equally potent. Fast-moving, riff-happy bangers such as "Young Guns", "Hometown Calling" and closing cruiser "Call Of The Wild" provide the more metallic highlights, with the former featuring some truly ferocious double kick work out of Robban Bäck that predicts his more metallic showing on the next album. But even when things lean back into a more mid-paced stride, the bottom-heavy punch of sing-along goodies like "To Mend A Broken Heart" and '2 Souls", the presentation is hard enough to pass for some of the more metallic offerings out of Frontiers' extended family. But the song that really brings this album home is the charming classical guitar intro turned quick rocking "Under The Gun", with the most unforgettable chorus hook of the bunch that takes several cues from Stratovarius' playbook.

Although this may not fully cross over into overt heavy metal territory, it sounds like it wants to through the lion's share of these songs, and even the lighter moments are notably punchier than your typical Whitesnake or Europe outing. The fact that Magnus and Erik opted to go it alone on engineering and production duties on this one underscores this as the trajectory of the band itself, and not necessarily something openly pushed by Frontiers Records' executives. It's a bit on the predictable side, there is scarcely a song on here that ventures too far past the 4 minute mark, but for all of its AOR trappings it still proves to be a fun listen that the average melodic metal fan trustee can appreciate. They would continue to get better, but they were already extremely good by this point.