With a beautiful cover art and full of commercial elements the band AVELION launches its debut full-length album entitled "Illusion Of Transparency". The band bets on simple riffs without much elaboration or deeper work, along with very cliché vocals, with a lot of effects. William Verderi (Lead Vocals), Oreste Giacomini (Keyboards and Programming), Leonardo Freggi (Guitars), Danilo Arisi (Bass) and Alessandro Ponzi (Drums) bring the sonority of the classic Heavy Metal with some attempts to insert some progressivity during their songs.

The album has some good points like the inclusion of female vocals in the ballad "Derailed Trails of Life". The electronic effects of "Burst Inside" and "Falling Down" reminded me a lot of those 8-bit video-games sound like The Nintendo for example, which despite waking me some nostalgia was not pleasant at all. "Fading Out", "Innocence Dies" and "Waste My Time" work on the same kind of introduction with a kind of ambient sound followed by vocals, which shows a certain lack of creativity in the band.

If "Echoes and Fragrance" was not so similar to many songs made by KAMELOT would be one of the best tracks on the album, but it seemed more like an emotionless cover of the American band. "Is not No Dawn" is an interesting song, because it has a lot of Nu Metal elements, but stays very melodic elsewhere. "Never Wanted" closes the album with a little more of creativity and weight, but the sonority is still too generic anyway, giving the impression that I've heard at least 100 similar bands. AVELION'S debut suffers with a lack of creativity and also the lyrics are nothing more than usual. On the other hand, as it is common in bands that bring the simplest instruments and value more to the commercial side the production of the album and the videos of promotion of the band are extremely well done as well as the mixing, although the vocals are a bit lower than I would like.