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 27-2023: Agora – Empire
When bands who don’t traditionally sing in English release English-language material, there is always a risk involved, especially vocally. Singers may sound wildly different in another language or simply not feel as comfortable not singing in their native tongue. Also, the interaction between the music and the vocals may not…
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Album of the Week 24-2023: Leather – We Are the Chosen
Human voices change with age. That is unavoidable. Singers adapt their voices or their parts to it, but in a full-force singing genre like heavy metal, there is often some loss of power. And singers with a bit of grit somehow tend to be the first to deteriorate. Not Leather…
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Album of the Week 23-2023: Mari Hamada – Soar
‘Soar’ is the most consistent Mari Hamada album in decades. While it features a similar elegant, bombastic power metal light style as her previous couple of albums, the songwriting is just better across the board, making ‘Soar’ a very entertaining listen throughout its entire runtime rather than just a couple…
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Album of the Week 18-2023: Burning Witches – The Dark Tower
Traditional heavy metal is a difficult field to stand out in. Even the better of the younger bands occasionally have moments that make you wish you were listening to the bands that inspired them instead. That used to be my exact opinion about Burning Witches: why would I listen to…
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Album of the Week 17-2023: Anthem – Crimson & Jet Black
Solid. Dependable. This may sound like a car commercial, but really, those adjectives describe Japanese heavy metal titans Anthem just as well. Since the early eighties, Anthem has been churning out quality heavy metal album after quality heavy metal album. Where many of their peers have had extended periods of…
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Album of the Week 09-2023: Crescent Lament – Land of Lost Voices
Even now that increasingly fewer people let language barriers stand in the way of exploring music with non-English lyrics, it seems extreme metal bands from East Asia have a somewhat easier time finding their foreign audiences than metal bands with cleaner vocals. The somewhat proggy and very folky heavy metal…
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Album of the Week 08-2023: Lovebites – Judgement Day
When founding bassist Miho announced her departure from Lovebites, my concerns about the band’s future were sizable. She was the most outspoken metalhead of the band and generally wrote my favorite songs. Fortunately, ‘Judgement Day’, the first album without her, has all the hallmarks of a great Lovebites album. The…
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Album of the Week 07-2023: Gargoyle – Kuromitten
Looking back now, ‘Kuromitten’ turned out to be a bit of a turning point in Gargoyle’s career. It came off the back of a string of albums that – with the notable exception of ‘Kemonomichi’ – sounded as close to Gargoyle going through the motions as the band would ever…
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Best of 2022: The Albums
Let’s start the introduction to the list of my favorite albums of the year by stating the obvious: 2022 was the greatest year for new music in a long time. It took a while before the music industry got there. For a while during the first half of the year,…
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