Progressive Rock Reviews
Since I generally tend to prefer progressive rock over progressive metal – seventies-style progressive rock in particular – the style is represented relatively well on Kevy Metal. Since I tend to lean towards the more riffy, guitar-driven side of the progressive rock spectrum rather than the folky or keyboard-laden side of it, those who enjoy the bands reviewed in my progressive metal reviews and my hard rock reviews might find something to enjoy here as well. These are all my Album of the Week reviews about progressive rock releases.
Using tags effecitvely is something I didn’t do until a couple of years in. As a result, some progressive rock revies may show up here. If you are looking for something specific, I recommend using the search bar at the bottom of the page.
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Album of the Week 38-2025: Amorphis – Borderland
The line between having a clearly defined style and going through the motions is a very fine one. While Amorphis has sporadically found itself on the wrong side of that line – 2011’s ‘The Beginning of Times’ comes to mind – it is genuinely amazing how they have a sound…
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EP of the Week 36.5: Traversus – Navigate
Few young bands excite me quite as much as Traversus does. There is something about the way the Dutch quartet mixes the complexity of progressive metal with the accessibility of melodic rock music that simply works. Traversus manages to avoid the pitfalls of both styles in a way even veterans…
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Album of the Week 29-2025: Styx – Circling from Above
Enjoying Styx is apparently frowned upon by many American rock aficionados. Fortunately, I am European, and I don’t give a damn. In fact, the band deserves a fair amount of respect in my book for not just being a nostalgia-driven legacy act as they could have done – and as…
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Album of the Week 19-2025: Hedvig Mollestad Trio – Bees in the Bonnet
Hardrockers trying to get into jazz in the twenty-first century should go straight to the music of Norwegian guitarist Hedvig Mollestad Thomassen. In my opinion, no one is more proficient at blending the raw power and compositional backbone of rock music with the harmonic richness and adventurous chord work of…
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Album of the Week 46-2024: Opeth – The Last Will and Testament
After the first song released off ‘The Last Will and Testament’ showed Mikael Åkerfeldt growling for the first time since 2008’s ‘Watershed’, rumors of the album being a return to form started surfacing. This is the wrong way to approach the album for two reasons. First off, Opeth never really…
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Album of the Week 12-2024: For All We Know – By Design or By Disaster
For All We Know has always been one of my favorite side projects by a prominent musician, the musician in question being Within Temptation guitarist Ruud Jolie. The emotional, somewhat proggy rock music Jolie has been exploring on the For All We Know albums is fairly subtle compared to the…
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Album of the Week 08-2024: Tang Dynasty – Mángcì
The black sheep of Tang Dynasty’s discography is actually my second favorite album of theirs. Second only after the near-flawless sophomore album ‘Yǎnyì’, better known in the western world as ‘Epic’. Sure, ‘Mángcì’ (‘Thorn’) sounds different from the band’s earliest works in the sense that its overall sound is significantly…
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Album of the Week 48-2023: Peter Gabriel – i/o
While it doesn’t quite have the reputation that ‘Chinese Democracy’ or ‘Black Messiah’ had, ‘i/o’ has been about twenty years in the making. It probably helps that Peter Gabriel had been on tour and releasing things in the intervening years, but ‘i/o’ was originally slated for release as early as…
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Album of the Week 36-2023: Ningen Isu – Shikisokuzekū
2021’s ‘Kuraku’ was as close to a median Ningen Isu album as we ever got. Solid, but unspectacular. Fortunately, the power trio from Aomori has a way of following lesser albums up with something amazing. The lackluster ‘Burai Hōjō’ was followed by the crusing masterpiece ‘Kaidan Soshite Shi to Eros‘,…
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