Emerald Sun was founded in 1998 and Escape From Twilight is their first full length album. This Greek band makes no secret their complete and utter worship of everything Helloween and other cliché ridden power metal. Emerald Sun offers up a sound that has a stronger keyboard presence yet otherwise adds absolutely nothing new to the genre.

Every muted riff or harmonized lead scale run by guitarists Teo Savage and Johnny Athanasiadis and big melodic Michael Kiske styled vocal by Jimmy Santrazami has been either done of heard before. The Helloween worship is almost too much to bear at times with this band. Scream Out Loud manages to capture my interest with its speedy muted riffs and Keeper era Helloween style as does the instrumental track Emerald Sun. Epic in nature with lots of tempo changes and interludes, this one's a tour de force of instrumental power metal. The music and especially the guitar riffs are strong for the entire album and the production is solid as well. The strong keyboard presence on a few tracks also brings classic Visions era Stratovarius to mind. The real fault with this band is the lack lustre vocals and weak, uninteresting choruses. Jimmy Santrazami has a strong voice but he does very little to infuse any sort of energy into this band's music. The album features a couple of power ballads with Eyes Of Prophecy as well as the epic and folk-influenced The Story Begins. The album closer Not Alone is another power ballad like track yet this one manages to balance the clean and heavier passages in a much more cohesive fashion than the others on the album. Other tracks feature strong instrumentation and very high quality lead guitar work yet many are marred by inferior vocal melodies, especially H.M. An ode to all things heavy metal, the promising sounds of galloping and fast flurries of speed and double bass are marred by an awful, awful chorus.

For a Helloween clone and a generic power metal band, these guys actually have some redeeming qualities including a strong overall sound and solid song writing ideas. I believe that this album just doesn't reach it's potential due to inferior vocal melodies and choruses. There's still room for bands like these (i.e. Armory) yet the bar has been raised quite high by the stiff competition in this genre of power metal. If you're really into all these "clone" bands and must have everything that has the classic Helloween Keeper era sound, this will definitely appeal to you. Otherwise, Emerald Sun's Escape From Twilight is just another in a seemingly endless line of generic power metal releases.