How do you appeal to those happy in the rock-and-roll comfort zones but who want something new? How do you lean into the great music of the past while taking everything you love about it into the future? How do you find new places to take music in a genre that largely found its perfect form decades ago? Well, I guess if we knew the answers to questions like that, we would all be making music that’s as simultaneously fresh and familiar as Erik Hansen does here.
The Eternal Conflict is one of those albums that slides neatly into the dusty ranks of your old vintage classic rock vinyl, but it also cuts a dash in the modern rock ‘n’ roll age. It’s a perfect sonic balancing act. Take the opener, ‘Far Away’: it riffs, it roars, it rips, it races along —controlled but energetic —, and it lays out the style perfectly: new music made in the vein of everything rock and roll has always done so well.
‘Holding Out and On’ blends the tribal glory of, say, ‘The Cult’ once they wandered from the alternative fringes into the rock limelight, with a more traditionally 80s vibe, a neat blend of poise and polish and power and punch!
‘In Your Eyes’ is Lizzy-esque, never a bad thing; ‘Dreaming in the Dark’ broods atmospherically; ‘Seasons’ creeps into the slower, grungier side of alt-rock; well, Erik is from Seattle, so it’s probably in the water.
It isn’t rock music’s job to change the world, although, to be fair, it has already done that three or four times. Rock music’s job is to make your night…The Eternal Conflict will certainly do that.
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