Gothic Metal Reviews
The thick, distorted guitar tones of heavy metal combined with the dark, romantic overtones of gothic rock – with the occasional poppy bombast of stadium rock – what’s not to like? There are plenty of gothic rock reviews on Kevy Metal, but the Album of the Week reviews about the releases of gothic metal bands outnumber them, because they tend to stick around for longer and release more than two or three worthwhile albums. All gothic metal reviews published on Kevy Metal can be found right here.
Not having properly tagged my reviews until a couple of years in, I may have written some gothic metal reviews that don’t show up here. Using the search bar at the bottom of the page is highly recommended if you are looking for something specific.
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Album of the Week 15-2024: Dool – The Shape of Fluidity
On the surface, Dool seems to operate in similar territory as most of the dark rock bands that have been popping up slowly but steadily in recent years. Not unlike the gothic rock acts that inspired those bands, however, most of them manage to release one captivating album, after which…
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Album of the Week 26-2023: Stravaganzza – Sentimientos
The symphonic metal landscape has the potential to be so much more than it actually is. Somehow, the bigger bands end up doing similar things: sacrificing complexity in the songwriting for more bombastic arrangements, the female vocals are clean and operatic, the male vocals are growled or screamed. Spain’s Stravaganzza…
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Album of the Week 09-2023: Crescent Lament – Land of Lost Voices
Even now that increasingly fewer people let language barriers stand in the way of exploring music with non-English lyrics, it seems extreme metal bands from East Asia have a somewhat easier time finding their foreign audiences than metal bands with cleaner vocals. The somewhat proggy and very folky heavy metal…
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Album of the Week 08-2021: Epica – Omega
While many bands that are often mentioned in the same breath as them tend to settle into a routine of simple songs of heavy-light contrasts that allow their singers – often female, but the likes of Kamelot are in the same category – to shine, Epica keeps reinventing itself and…
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Album of the Week 42-2020: After Forever – Decipher
All of the better bands from Holland’s late nineties wave of female-fronted goth-ish metal bands had something special, often rendering them far less gothic than they were given credit for. After Forever’s debut album ‘Prison Of Desire’ seemed to suggest they only had one of the better singers of the…
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Album of the Week 20-2020: Triptykon with the Metropole Orkest – Requiem
No announcements, hardly any crowd noise, two thirds of the material never played before or since… Even live albums aren’t done in a conventional way by Triptykon. Of course, a conventional live album was never the set-up of ‘Requiem’. It combines the first and third acts of a requiem released…
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Album of the Week 17-2020: My Dying Bride – The Ghost Of Orion
Another one of those releases that initially went by rather unnoticed because I was underwhelmed by its predecessor was the new My Dying Bride album ‘The Ghost Of Orion’. To me, ‘Feel The Misery’ felt a little too My Dying Bride by the numbers and featured one of Aaron Stainthorpe’s…
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Album of the Week 15-2020: Dool – Summerland
Three years ago, debut album ‘Here Now, There Then’ by the Rotterdam-based band Dool took me completely by surprise. While it’s not uncommon for dark rock bands to nail the atmosphere associated with the scene, Dool actually has the songwriting chops and the exquisitely arranged guitar tapestries to completely ditch…
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Album of the Week 02-2020: Apocalyptica – Cell-0
Apocalyptica has never shied away from trying new things. Some of those were great ideas, such as moving beyond the novelty of being a cello-only metal cover band by writing original material and adding drums. Others were hit and miss, such as adding vocals. As a result, Apocalyptica’s journey has…