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 46-2023: The Black Crowes – Shake Your Money Maker
Back when I discovered The Black Crowes, I was twelve or thirteen and therefore not really able to articulate this yet, but subconsciously, they immediately appealed to me because their songwriting was so much better than that of most of their peers. And although the band would later occasionally fail…
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Album of the Week 45-2023: Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin
If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you probably know enough about music to not need me to tell you that Led Zeppelin’s first album is one of the finest debut albums in rock history. Arguably the best debut out of all the rock greats of its era,…
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Album of the Week 36-2023: Ningen Isu – Shikisokuzekū
2021’s ‘Kuraku’ was as close to a median Ningen Isu album as we ever got. Solid, but unspectacular. Fortunately, the power trio from Aomori has a way of following lesser albums up with something amazing. The lackluster ‘Burai Hōjō’ was followed by the crusing masterpiece ‘Kaidan Soshite Shi to Eros‘,…
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Album of the Week 33-2023: Vandenberg – Sin
Three years ago, Adrian Vandenberg surprised the rock world by reviving the band that carried his name and releasing ‘2020’, an album that was arguably his heaviest up until that point. Enough of a sleazy feel in the rhythms to call it hardrock, but the riffs are heavy enough to…
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Album of the Week 30-2023: Medina Azahara – Sin Tiempo
Medina Azahara is one of the pioneers of the Andalusian rock scene, which combines elements of rock and Andalusian folk music. Initially, the type of rock in Medina Azahara’s cocktail was progressive rock heavily inspired by early Genesis. But with the arrival of guitarist Francisco ‘Paco’ Ventura in the late…
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Album of the Week 29-2023: Halford – Resurrection
At the time when Halford’s debut album ‘Resurrection’ was released, it was frequently compared to ‘Accident at Birth’ by Bruce Dickinson, who had recently re-joined Iron Maiden. Both albums featured a return to heavy metal – with a somewhat modern bite – by iconic singers after a couple of years…
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Album of the Week 28-2023: ArkRoyal – Clymenus
ArkRoyal is a band that does things a little differently. Even superficially; the fact that their singer Illumina also plays guitar is quite an anomaly by Japanese rock standards, to the point where I might have thought it actually was illegal to do so for all-female bands – or visual…
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Album of the Week 23-2023: Mari Hamada – Soar
‘Soar’ is the most consistent Mari Hamada album in decades. While it features a similar elegant, bombastic power metal light style as her previous couple of albums, the songwriting is just better across the board, making ‘Soar’ a very entertaining listen throughout its entire runtime rather than just a couple…
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Album of the Week 20-2023: Arjen Lucassen’s Supersonic Revolution – Golden Age of Music
If carefully crafting massive prog rock operas is your day job, what do you do for fun? Well, if Arjen Lucassen’s new project Supersonic Revolution is anything to go by: playing rather spontaneous-sounding seventies-inspired hard rock with a bunch of relatively local friends. ‘Golden Age of Music’ is an often…
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