Let me be honest. I listened to this album in several painful attempts. Vastly blended with nice portions of Down or Clutch to make me stay in the room and not to leave, grumpy with the loudspeakers. The music in “Avalon” is a lyrical cliché that we have heard many times before, most of them served by the same singer. In the weeks before releasing his first solo disc, Sully Erna drummed that this would be the deepest music he has ever written, his strongest record. Allow me not agree, Mr. Erna. Your strongest record to date remains the debut of Godsmack. Right now he is the next big name from the next big band that runs by the inertia of its past glory and the cheap desires of the masses it satisfies. Loud PR, world tours, expensive videos and in fact nothing substantial behind the booklet. The songs in “Avalon” remind too much of the acoustic EP of Godsmack “The Other Side”. Actually they don’t even remind but they sound if they were taken out of it. They consist of leading percussions, acoustic guitars, string background from the violin of Irina Chirkova and the signature voice of Sully Erna when he sings lyrically. But as much as he endeavors with his so typical melancholic moan, all the same in each track of the album, and even with the participation of Lisa Gayer whom we’ve heard also in Godsmack’s “Hollow”, the songs sound more like a flat and insipid copy of the fabulous unplugged of Alice In Chains (anyone surprised?). And the nice keyboard melody of the chorus of the only interesting song “Broken Road” doesn’t help a lot for the easy digesting of the album. As for the single “Sinner’s Prayer”, mambo-jambo, go home! The brags of Erna, the seven years of writing the album and the lyrical-melancholic drapes of “Avalon” may deeply touch American teenagers and emotional girls who have heard 20 bands in their lives but when I am in the mood for honest man’s music, I’ll play Zakk Wylde’s 1996 solo album “Book of Shadows” or any record by Ray Wilson.