Power Metal Reviews
High tempos, soaring vocals, memorable choruses, and majestic melodies – often harmonies – all made me an avid power metal fan as an early teenager. And despite getting into other genres through the years, my love for power metal never really faded away. As a result, quite a large part of my Album of the Week reviews have been about power metal albums. You can find all the power metal reviews published on Kevy Metal right here. Overlaps with my heavy metal reviews inevitably exist.
If you are looking something that isn’t listed here, I might still have reviewed it. I didn’t start properly tagging my reviews until a few years in. You can use the search bar to search for any artist or release you want to know more about using the search bar at the bottom of the page.
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Album of the Week 10-2017: Pentagram – Bir
Around the time ‘Unspoken’ was released, Pentagram must have realized that there was a demand for their Turkish language songs, which the album lacked. So a year after that album, the band released ‘Bir’, a collection consisting entirely of songs in Turkish lyrics or without any lyrics at all. This…
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Album of the Week 09-2017: Onmyo-za – Fuujin Kaikou
With the genre nearing five decades of existence, finding unique sounding metal is becoming increasingly difficult. Onmyo-za somehow succeeds at doing so without attempting anything too far-fetched. Their riffs and twin melodies are generally from the traditional heavy metal and hard rock mold, but their open-minded approach to songwriting allows…
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Album of the Week 02-2017: Firewind – Immortals
Due to the band members being busy with other projects, Firewind has been a little dormant the last couple of years, but luckily there is a new album. And not just any album, it’s the first metal highlight of 2017. Everything the relatively lackluster ‘Few Against Many’ was missing is…
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Album of the Week 01-2017: Stygma IV – The Human Twilight Zone
Sometimes bands are so short of the attention they deserve, that they even surprise me pleasantly when I come across them in my own collection. Because really, Stygma IV’s brand of dark, somewhat progressive power metal is nothing short of excellent. And yet, they’re not exactly a household name. Maybe…
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Album of the Week 51-2016: Mary’s Blood – Fate
There has been a veritable cornucopia of female heavy and power metal bands from Japan these last few years. A few of them are good, a lot of them are too upbeat and poppy for my taste and then there’s Mary’s Blood. Armed with an array of excellent contemporary heavy…
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Album of the Week 48-2016: Metalium – As One
On the surface, Metalium is another typical German power metal band. They have the rolling double bass drums, the uptempo songs and the anthemic choruses. They have a couple of assets that set them apart from that saturated field though. One of them is the excellent singer Henning Basse, but…
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Album of the Week 46-2016: X – Vanishing Vision
For a band that would be all over the place stylistically, X Japan – still just X at the time – debuted with a surprisingly metal oriented effort. All the idiosyncrasies that would later make them one of Japan’s biggest bands are here – not in the last place their…
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Album of the Week 41-2016: Labÿrinth – Return To Heaven Denied
Romantic isn’t the first word you think of when it comes to metal. Yet it’s exactly the first adjective that comes to mind when describing Labÿrinth’s sophomore album ‘Return To Heaven Denied’. That doesn’t mean the record is full of shallow love songs. Okay, it’s not extremely heavy, but there’s…
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Album of the Week 40-2016: Epica – The Holographic Principle
Regardless of your opinion on Epica, you have to admire their ambition. This time, the band decided to beef up their already bombastic sound by leaving orchestral samples for what they are and using only real instruments. That may seem like a minor detail, but it won’t take long to…
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