Hard Rock Reviews
As much as I like to call myself and this site Kevy Metal, my journey into music actually began with hard rock. Seventies and nineties hardrock – plus contemporary bands inspired by these styles – are still a significant part of what I listen to, and therefore, Album of the Week reviews on hard rock bands are published frequently. You can find all of them right here. Overlaps with my heavy metal reviews inevitably exist.
Looking for something specific, but can’t find it by browsing the reviews? Searching by artist name or release title using the search bar might bring up some Album of the Week reviews I have written before I started tagging my reviews properly.
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Album of the Week 28-2020: Hedvig Mollestad – Ekhidna
What Hedvig Mollestad does with her own trio – blending Sabbathian stoner rock grooves with jazzy improvisations – is already impressive, but I was not prepared for the genius of ‘Ekhidna’. While the seventies rock riffs are still everywhere, Mollestad and her five companions dial the jazz factor way up,…
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Album of the Week 26-2020: Turbo – Dorosłe Dzieci
While ‘Dorosłe Dzieci’ isn’t necessarily my favorite Turbo album – that would probably be the more thrashy ‘Kawaleria Szatana’ – it is one of the most accomplished debut albums of all time. It largely foregoes the flaws debut albums tend to suffer from, such as still being in search of…
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Album of the Week 25-2020: Takenori Shimoyama – The Power Of Redemption
‘The Power Of Redemption’ is the second solo album Saber Tiger singer Takenori Shimoyama has released in less than six months. It is however, significantly different than ‘Way Of Life’, released in November. While Shimoyama’s raw, impassioned vocals worked surprisingly well with the largely acoustic music on that record, ‘The…
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Album of the Week 16-2020: Accept – The Rise Of Chaos
Despite liking the Mark Tornillo-fronted era of Accept, ‘The Rise Of Chaos’ kind of passed me by initially. Looking back, the inconsistency of its predecessor ‘Blind Rage’ combined with the promise of a somewhat more straightforward album and a few bouts of extreme lyrical simplicity in the preview tracks probably…
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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 14-2020: Saxon – Lionheart
Following the departure of original guitarist Graham Oliver, Saxon gradually grew into too much of a German-styled power metal band. This is not to discredit his follow-up Doug Scarratt, who is probably the best musician to ever play with the band, but the beefy, modern production jobs on their later…
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Album of the Week 13-2020: Hibiki – Hands Of Providence
Anyone with a more than casual interest in Japanese metal has undoubtedly heard at least one album that hibiki plays on. Ever since his virtuosic playing first rose to prominence in the progressive power metal band Light Bringer, he has become one of the most in-demand bassists of the Japanese…
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Album of the Week 12-2020: Badlands – Voodoo Highway
Supergroups really worth anything are rare, but Badlands definitely was one. It may help that hardly any of the band members were household names to the rock audience at large, with only guitarist Jake E. Lee having a high profile gig fulfilling the thankless task of replacing Randy Rhoads in…
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Album of the Week 11-2020: Onmyo-za – Hyakki-Ryoran
Only a year had passed between the releases of Onmyo-za’s debut album ‘Kikoku Tensho’ and sophomore record ‘Hyakki-Ryoran’, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the massive improvement the latter is over the former. Where the debut had promising, but largely underdeveloped material, ‘Hyakki-Ryoran’ features some of the best…
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