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 17-2023: Anthem – Crimson & Jet Black
Solid. Dependable. This may sound like a car commercial, but really, those adjectives describe Japanese heavy metal titans Anthem just as well. Since the early eighties, Anthem has been churning out quality heavy metal album after quality heavy metal album. Where many of their peers have had extended periods of…
-
Album of the Week 16-2023: NoGoD – Now Testament
After their highly creative lead guitarist Kyrie left the band, I was not sure what to expect from NoGoD. Sure, they still had one of their greatests assets in the powerfully emotional vocals of Dancho – without a doubt one of the best singers in the visual kei scene –…
-
Album of the Week 14-2023: OverKill – Scorched
Veteran thrash metal bands are in a curious position when it comes to new material. Their audiences don’t expect them to be as impressed by a new album as they were by their classic releases. It just needs to be good enough to keep the tour bus rolling for a…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
Kevy Metal 