Progressive Metal Reviews
Although I have a somewhat conflicted relationship with the progressive metal genre, the bands that tackle the style well tend to do so exceptionally well. If you like your time signatures odd and often changing, your song structures unpredictable, your chords and harmonies sophisticated, and your songs long, make sure to check up on Kevy Metal’s progressive metal reviews from time to time. You can find all my progressive metal Album of the Week reviews right here.
However, I did not start properly tagging my reviews until a couple of years in. If you are looking for something that doesn’t show up, it might still be there. I recommend using the search bar at the bottom of the page if you are looking for something specific.
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Album of the Week 12-2017: Seikima-II – Mephistopheles no Shouzou
A cliché often used for eighties rock bands that survived through the nineties is that their records sound as if the nineties didn’t happen. Hardly any album answers more to that sentiment than ‘Mephistopheles No Shouzou’. Despite being released in 1996, the compositions, arrangements and production scream eighties hard rock…
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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 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 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 45-2016: Gargoyle – Furebumi
If you think Japanese music is weird, this album – or this band, for that matter – isn’t going to change your mind. When I discovered it, however, it provided me with something that I had been looking for a long time: the guitar riffs and intensity of thrash metal…
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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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Album of the Week 32-2016: Porcupine Tree – The Incident
For a genre with “progressive” in its name, there have been relatively little young progressive Rock heroes these last years. Steven Wilson has been the last man to be widely accepted as a Prog guru and even though he doesn’t look like it, he is in his late forties. A…
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