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 36-2024: Flotsam and Jetsam – I Am the Weapon
When bands from the eighties release something worthwhile these days, it often gets designated as a “best since” release. The implication being that it’s good, but not as good as the classics. One band that is at least as good today as they were in the eighties, possibly even better,…
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Album of the Week 35-2024: Stryper – When We Were Kings
Stryper’s latter-day streak of great albums that started with ‘Murder by Pride’ (2009) came to a screeching halt with the bland ‘Even the Devil Believes’ (2020) and the severely underdeveloped ‘The Final Battle’ (2022). Although ‘When We Were Kings’ doesn’t quite reach the heights of 2015’s ‘Fallen‘ – which might…
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EP of the Week 34.5-2024: Lovebites – Lovebites EP II
Just over seven years ago, ‘The Lovebites EP’ was released. Despite the history that some of the band members had in a couple of underground bands that gigged fairly frequently – Destrose most notably – it was the first introduction for many people to the music of the band that…
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Album of the Week 34-2024: Vendel – Out in the Fields
Sometimes, applying a certain genre tag to a band doesn’t really do its sound any justice. Going by stylistic characteristics and influences alone, Vendel can be placed firmly within epic heavy/doom metal territory. And yet, they sound nothing like the Manilla Road, Manowar and Solitude Aeturnus wannabes that scene is…
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Album of the Week 33-2024: Horcas – El Diablo
For veteran heavy metal acts, there isn’t much incentive to release something that is better than good enough to keep them touring for a couple more years. Not sure if it works quite the same in Horcas’ native Argentina, but it seems like it does. That is exactly why any…
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Album of the Week 31-2024: Volcano – Tenka-Musou
‘Tenka-Musou’ is Volcano focusing on its biggest strengths. Plain and simple. In that sense, the four year break between ‘Tenka-Musou’ and its direct predecessor ‘Godspeed’ seems to have done the band well. Where that album had moments of subtle experimentation to mix up the band’s tried-and-true formula a bit, largely…
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Album of the Week 29-2024: Dolmen Gate – Gateways of Eternity
Bands don’t often sound so sure of what they want their music to sound like on their debut album as Dolmen Gate does on ‘Gateways of Eternity’. The Portuguese quintet combines an epic heavy metal sound with surprisingly sharp, concise songwriting, exuding a confidence that isn’t commonly heard on a…
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Album of the Week 28-2024: SkyEye – New Horizons
While the power metal scene in Western Europe is growing staler by the minute, with so much pop music with distorted guitars dominating the festival bills, there are fortunately plenty of other places to look for good bands. Slovenia’s SkyEye, for instance, has found a nice niche for itself with…
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Album of the Week 25-2024: Crystal Viper – The Silver Key
For the longest time, Crystal Viper had been suffering from a debut album that was too good, in the sense that 2007’s ‘The Curse of Crystal Viper’ was so good that subsequent releases just could not live up to it. In recent years, however, the band has tweaked a few…
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