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.
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Album of the Week 31-2021: Ningen Isu – Kuraku
The harshest thing I can say about ‘Kuraku’, the twenty-second album by Japanese power trio Ningen Isu, is that it is another Ningen Isu album. It does not quite set the world on fire like its predecessor ‘Shin Seinen’ did, but it simply features guitarist Shinji Wajima, bassist Kenichi Suzuki…
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Album of the Week 30-2021: Heretic – Breaking Point
Mike Howe’s untimely death earlier this week spurred on a lot of people to put on the excellent albums he recorded with Metal Church again. For the record, I don’t think either Howe or Metal Church have ever sounded as good as on those records, but I thought it might…
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Album of the Week 29-2021: Anthrax – Spreading The Disease
Out of the so-called Big Four of thrash metal, Anthrax has always been the one I am most conflicted about. Admittedly, this is at least in part due to the fact that the songs that became staples for the band generally are not their strongest material or, even worse, covers…
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Album of the Week 28-2021: Rakshasa – Hyakka Sousei
Rakshasa came to my attention while searching for bands that sound like Onmyo-za. They don’t really; both bands have an approach that combines heavy metal with traditional Japanese elements in their sound and aesthetics, as well as an emphasis on female vocals – pretty much exclusively in Rakshasa’s case –…
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Album of the Week 25-2021: Helloween – Helloween
It would be tempting to compare Helloween’s first album after the return of singer Michael Kiske and founding guitarist Kai Hansen to the reunion that made Iron Maiden a three-guitar band. A better comparison would be Testament’s reunion with Alex Skolnick and Greg Christian. Maybe a weird comparison, but like…
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Album of the Week 24-2021: Galneryus – Union Gives Strength
During the period leading up to the release of ‘Union Gives Strength’, Galneryus consistently referred to the release as a “special album” in marketing outings. So what’s so special about it? They probably did not want to give the impression that it’s one hour plus of new material, as roughly…
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Album of the Week 22-2021: Burning Witches – The Witch Of The North
Around the time Burning Witches started writing for last year’s ‘Dance With The Devil’, the Swiss band seemed to realize that they needed a little more variation in order to stand out from the crop of younger traditional heavy metal bands. On that particular album, the increased variation in tempos…
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Album of the Week 20-2021: Kat – …Róże Miłości Najchętniej Przyjmują Się Na Grobach
Back in the early to mid-nineties, every heavy or thrash metal band that didn’t outright disband slowed down their music. Ever the idiosyncratic band, Kat decided to bypass groove metal into a sound not too dissimilar to doom metal on ‘…Róże Miłości Najchętniej Przyjmują Się Na Grobach’. While many of…
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Album of the Week 19-2021: Blind Guardian – Tales From The Twilight World
Transitional periods are often interesting and somewhat risky for bands. In case of Blind Guardian, ‘Tales From The Twilight World’ and ‘Somwhere Far Beyond’ still feature the band’s early speed metal roots fairly prominently, but the arrangements in particular already hint at the more theatrical sound they would later come…
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