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 45-2024: The Damned Few – Karabasan
Very few new(-ish) rock bands actually manage to excite me, as many young bands these days tend to overthink their productions and arrangements instead of just going for the jugular. Fortunately, bands like The Damned Few pop up every once in a while, proving that it’s still perfectly possible to…
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Album of the Week 44-2024: Lucifer’s Hammer – Be and Exist
‘Be and Exist’ is the next step in the evolution of Lucifer’s Hammer. 2021’s ‘The Trip’ already saw the Chilean band enhancing their NWOBHM-based sound with more adventurous compositions, making their music more than just solid and fun, but their latest release really goes a long way in carving a…
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Album of the Week 43-2024: Myles Kennedy – The Art of Letting Go
Out of all of his solo releases, ‘The Art of Letting Go’ is the one that probably sounds closest to Myles Kennedy’s main band Alter Bridge. It’s not like it could have had Alter Bridge’s name on the cover, but ‘The Art of Letting Go’ is certainly more riff-heavy than…
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Album of the Week 42-2024: Jerry Cantrell – I Want Blood
After 2021’s ‘Brighten’ showed a somewhat lighter take on Jerry Cantrell’s trademark sound, more often than not with an acoustic foundation, its follow-up ‘I Want Blood’ is a rock album first and foremost. And while the album does not quite reach the pitch black depths of Cantrell’s masterpiece ‘Degradation Trip…
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Album of the Week 35-2024: Stryper – When We Were Kings
Stryper’s latter-day streak of great albums that started with ‘Murder by Pride’ (2009) came to a screeching halt with the bland ‘Even the Devil Believes’ (2020) and the severely underdeveloped ‘The Final Battle’ (2022). Although ‘When We Were Kings’ doesn’t quite reach the heights of 2015’s ‘Fallen‘ – which might…
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EP of the Week 34.5-2024: Lovebites – Lovebites EP II
Just over seven years ago, ‘The Lovebites EP’ was released. Despite the history that some of the band members had in a couple of underground bands that gigged fairly frequently – Destrose most notably – it was the first introduction for many people to the music of the band that…
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Album of the Week 33-2024: Horcas – El Diablo
For veteran heavy metal acts, there isn’t much incentive to release something that is better than good enough to keep them touring for a couple more years. Not sure if it works quite the same in Horcas’ native Argentina, but it seems like it does. That is exactly why any…
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Album of the Week 28-2024: SkyEye – New Horizons
While the power metal scene in Western Europe is growing staler by the minute, with so much pop music with distorted guitars dominating the festival bills, there are fortunately plenty of other places to look for good bands. Slovenia’s SkyEye, for instance, has found a nice niche for itself with…
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Album of the Week 24-2024: Black Country Communion – V
Supergroups rarely make it past two or three albums. The fact that Black Country Communion has seems to imply that there is some genuine chemistry between these musicians. And while I think the band peaked on their first two albums, at least their new album ‘V’ has a bit of…
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