Review Summary: Built on the success of Crowbar's self-titled album, Time heals nothing continues the band's onslaught of well-executed sludge metal.
Crowbar was a rather successful album for the band of the same name because it set such lofty musical standards for the sludge metal sub-genre that no other group could really tackle or raise the bar without doing something truly distinctive and making it work. That said, Crowbar's third album and the last before the band would go through a series of many line-up changes,
Time heals nothing, is still as consistent and as impressive as any other Crowbar release. Of course, the band's self-titled second album may have left an inescapable and virtually unreachable standard of heavy music to follow, but Crowbar, as everyone who loves the band knows, always manage to pull it off.
There are two types of songs to
Time heals nothing, which largely applies to Crowbar's other albums too. One type is shorter, faster-paced and an aural shock to the listener's ears, and the other is a slow-burning, depressively heavy affair of groovy, sludgy metal. The former takes its toll on songs such as the brilliant one-two punch of both opener “The only factor” and “No more can we crawl”, and the rhythm section here manages to stay remarkably heavy as well as reaching and exceeding the highest speed limits, something which after
Time heals nothing, Crowbar would try and refine. The bass-heavy sections of both “Lack of tolerance” and its violent successor “Still I reach” also manage to kickstart the instrumental power into overdrive, making for an aggressive finish each and every time.
Longer songs such as the mournful and appropriately melancholic title track and “Through a wall of tears” seem to utilize Windstein's clean(er) vocal style, almost making him sound like a harmonic angel as opposed to a monstrous beast. Instrumentation flows beautifully with this hard-to-perfect vocal effect, and Nunenmacher's excellent drum rhythms make sure that nothing ever sounds out of place. Towards the end guitar work also seems to take on a more melodic approach, the physically battering albeit just as sorrowful heaviness of “A perpetual need” gives way to a tight and solid instrumental performance which, particularly due to the drum and bass rhythms working alongside each other, ends the song itself on a high.
The flaws that listeners will find here are exactly the same as on every Crowbar album: The lack of variety. Yet this can safely be ignored if all you need from a Crowbar album is a consistent set of heavy, aggressive/depressive songs filled to the brim with instrumental solidity and tightness. A couple of tracks here aren't quite as effective as every other, sure, but what
Time heals nothing really succeeds at is its impressive form, and it's inevitable that if you like every other Crowbar record, you'll like this one equally.
