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 21-2020: Hollow – Between Eternities Of Darkness
Back in the nineties, Sweden had its share of excellent power metal bands that were significantly darker than their German counterparts. But while Morgana Lefay and Tad Morose did manage to build somewhat of a following, there aren’t many people who seem to remember Hollow. Both ‘Modern Cathedral’ and ‘Architect…
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Album of the Week 19-2020: Stormlord – Far
Maybe I should just start a series of these. Since ‘Hesperia’ didn’t really do anything for me, I initially didn’t pay much attention to Stormlord’s sixth album ‘Far’. Big mistake. ‘Far’ rivals ‘Mare Nostrum’ as the Italians’ best album and is undoubtedly the next step in their evolution from extreme…
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Album of the Week 18-2020: Morgana Lefay – The Secret Doctrine
Possibly topping my list of metal bands that never got the recognition they deserved because the nineties happened is Morgana Lefay. Being mislabelled is part of the problem, as the Swedes were always lumped in with their country’s power metal scene, which doesn’t do them any justice. Morgana Lefay’s music…
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Album of the Week 16-2020: Accept – The Rise Of Chaos
Despite liking the Mark Tornillo-fronted era of Accept, ‘The Rise Of Chaos’ kind of passed me by initially. Looking back, the inconsistency of its predecessor ‘Blind Rage’ combined with the promise of a somewhat more straightforward album and a few bouts of extreme lyrical simplicity in the preview tracks probably…
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Album of the Week 14-2020: Saxon – Lionheart
Following the departure of original guitarist Graham Oliver, Saxon gradually grew into too much of a German-styled power metal band. This is not to discredit his follow-up Doug Scarratt, who is probably the best musician to ever play with the band, but the beefy, modern production jobs on their later…
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Album of the Week 11-2020: Onmyo-za – Hyakki-Ryoran
Only a year had passed between the releases of Onmyo-za’s debut album ‘Kikoku Tensho’ and sophomore record ‘Hyakki-Ryoran’, but you wouldn’t be able to tell from the massive improvement the latter is over the former. Where the debut had promising, but largely underdeveloped material, ‘Hyakki-Ryoran’ features some of the best…
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Album of the Week 10-2020: Burning Witches – Dance With The Devil
Burning Witches is a Swiss band that has been making a mix of traditional heavy metal and contemporary power metal for the last five years. I always found their music mildly entertaining, but something has changed with their new album ‘Dance With The Devil’. First off, there is a larger…
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Album of the Week 09-2020: Volcano – Godspeed
Reliability defines Volcano. They have steadily released new music since their last line-up change in 2010 and all of those albums contain a consistently good mix of equal parts thrash metal and classic heavy metal, with some touches of melodic death metal thrown in for good measure. Between 2015 and…
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Album of the Week 08-2020: Demons & Wizards – III
When things went quiet for a decade and a half after the release of their second album ‘Touched By The Crimson King’, I just assumed Demons & Wizards was finished. That would have been understandable, given that Jon Schaffer and Hansi Kürsch are incredibly busy with Iced Earth and Blind…
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