Heavy Metal Reviews

Heavy metal in all its varieties, and from all eras, is the bread and butter of Kevy Metal, if the name of the site had not given this away yet. All Album of the Week reviews about heavy metal albums published on Kevy Metal can be found right here.

Since I didn’t start properly tagging my reviews until a couple of years in, these aren’t all the heavy metal reviews I have done over the years. If you are looking for something specific, you can always search by band name or release title using the search bar at the bottom of the page.

  • Album of the Week 13-2023: The Alfee – Arcadia

    Possibly the longest-running active rock band in Japan, The Alfee managed to maintain a sizeable portion of its popularity by simultaneously staying true to their core sound and developing along with the changing trends of the rock landscape. Despite starting out as Japan’s answer to the American folk rock scene…

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  • Album of the Week 12-2023: Kinniku Shōjo Tai – Gekkō Chū

    Kinniku Shōjo Tai has a fairly sizeable discography of crazy, eclectic music. Because of that, it is difficult to pick a favorite or one to recommend to someone curious to begin with. If I was forced to pick one, however, it would be ‘Gekkō Chū’, the third release with what…

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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 08-2023: Lovebites – Judgement Day

    When founding bassist Miho announced her departure from Lovebites, my concerns about the band’s future were sizable. She was the most outspoken metalhead of the band and generally wrote my favorite songs. Fortunately, ‘Judgement Day’, the first album without her, has all the hallmarks of a great Lovebites album. The…

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  • Album of the Week 07-2023: Gargoyle – Kuromitten

    Looking back now, ‘Kuromitten’ turned out to be a bit of a turning point in Gargoyle’s career. It came off the back of a string of albums that – with the notable exception of ‘Kemonomichi’ – sounded as close to Gargoyle going through the motions as the band would ever…

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  • Album of the Week 06-2023: Cradle of Filth – Cruelty and the Beast

    Full disclosure: when I first heard ‘Cruelty and the Beast’ as an early teenager, I absolutely hated it. Partly because I did not understand it, but its messy production annoyed the hell out of me and may have planted the seed for generally disliking blastbeats to this day. It took…

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  • Album of the Week 05-2023: Rotting Christ – Aealo

    Rotting Christ is a band whose music has transcended multiple things throughout the years. Most notably their dumb band name and breaking out of the Greek metal scene when it was in its embryonic stages, but in a way, they also transcended their black metal roots to create something fairly…

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  • Album of the Week 03-2023: Onmyo-za – Ryūō Dōji

    Onmyo-za usually releases a new album every year or so. ‘Ryūō Dōji’ is their first album in nearly five years, presumably largely due to health issues that affected the hearing and vocal cords of singer Kuroneko. Fortunately, she sounds incredible here, though that could also be the result of ‘Ryūō…

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  • Best of 2022: The Albums

    Let’s start the introduction to the list of my favorite albums of the year by stating the obvious: 2022 was the greatest year for new music in a long time. It took a while before the music industry got there. For a while during the first half of the year,…

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