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 36-2017: Merry – M-Ology
‘M-Ology’ is the album I have been wanting Merry to make for about a decade. While I really liked ‘Nonsense Market’ (2014), everything about ‘M-Ology’ points at a total throwback to the days of ‘Modern Garde’ (2004). While such a “return to the roots” is a strained move for many…
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Album of the Week 35-2017: Living Colour – Shade
With ‘Shade’ only being the third album in the 17 years since Living Colour reformed – and the first in eight years – expectations were high. What exactly I expected, I don’t actually know, but it certainly wasn’t an album that sounds as raw and “live” as ‘Shade’ does, as…
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Album of the Week 34-2017: Cloven Hoof – Who Mourns For The Morning Star
Ever since resuming activities early this century, Cloven Hoof went through so many lineup changes, that I was not very hopeful about the recent ones. Sure, bassist and band leader Lee Payne is very enthusiastic about George Call’s voice, but anyone would say that about their new singer, right? This…
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Album of the Week 32-2017: Anthem – Domestic Booty
Some of Anthem’s best records have something awkward to them that has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual music. ‘Immortal’ has its album cover, ‘Domestic Booty’ its title. And maybe the fact that the band broke up for about a decade in the aftermath of this album’s release. Changes…
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Album of the Week 31-2017: The Joe Perry Project – Let The Music Do The Talking
Guitarist Joe Perry is often seen as the one who guards Aerosmith’s musical integrity next to Steven Tyler’s showmanship. Anyone with some in-depth knowledge about Aerosmith knows that grossly oversimplifies the band’s complicated dynamic, but it is a fact that during the Perry’s time away from the band, Perry released…
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Album of the Week 26-2017: Ningen Isu – Kaidan Soshite Shi To Eros
Ningen Isu is the best seventies power trio that is not actually from the seventies. Despite starting out in 1987, their brand of heavily Black Sabbath-inspired, yet progressively tinged metal would have fit the same bill as Rush and Budgie in the mid-seventies. While the band has recorded some excellent…
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Album of the Week 22-2017: Onmyo-za – Karyo-Binga
Released hot on the heels of the impressive diptych of ‘Fuujin Kaikou‘ and ‘Raijin Sousei’, it is something of a miracle that Onmyo-za still had enough inspiration left to write another excellent album. In fact, it is even better than the latter. ‘Karyo-Binga’ sounds manages to sound familiar and fresh…
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Album of the Week 21-2017: Seikima-II – Living Legend
According to Seikima-II’s own mythology, the band had to disband one second before the end of the 20th century. Luckily, they did not do so before releasing one more brilliant heavy metal album. Despite their reputation as an excellent heavy metal band, this was still a little surprising, because throughout…
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Album of the Week 20-2017: Heart – Little Queen
While Ann and Nancy Wilson are still soldiering on making good music – in fact, their most recent studio album ‘Fanatic’ is easily the best thing they’ve done since the late seventies – Heart made its best albums in the second half of the seventies. They were always a good…
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