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 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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Album of the Week 05-2020: Lovebites – Electric Pentagram
While Lovebites’ sophomore album ‘Clockwork Immortality’ was good, it was also a little too close to melodic hardrock to not be worried about the band’s future at times. Fortunately, ‘Electric Pentagram’ is a lot more metallic. In fact, the song titles may even suggest that the band is overcompensating for…
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Album of the Week 02-2020: Apocalyptica – Cell-0
Apocalyptica has never shied away from trying new things. Some of those were great ideas, such as moving beyond the novelty of being a cello-only metal cover band by writing original material and adding drums. Others were hit and miss, such as adding vocals. As a result, Apocalyptica’s journey has…
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Album of the Week 51-2019: The Vision Bleak – The Unknown
Gothic rock’s mournful melodies and doom metal’s crushing heaviness appear to be made for each other, both having an irresistibly ominous theatricality to them. More often than not, however, gothic metal bands go for the goth aesthetic rather than the stylistic properties of the genre. For every ‘Irreligious’, there is…
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Album of the Week 49-2019: Catharsis – Svetliy Albom
Sometimes it baffles me why some bands are bigger than others based on something as trivial as language. Several lower mid-tier power metal bands are drawing decent crowds throughout Europe, while a fantastic band like Catharsis is approached with caution simply because they sing in Russian. Because make no mistake,…
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