Crowbar: Time Heals Nothing (1995)

Merry Christmas!  Time to celebrate with this incredibly uplifting album!

After seeing Crowbar live earlier this year and being absolutely blown away by their performance, I decided it was probably time to get into some of their classic material.  For whatever reason, I never really did before.  My early experiences with them may have had something to do with that.  I remember them appearing on Beavis and Butthead a couple of times and the duo mercilessly mocking them.  So I got the impression they were sort of a joke.  But Kirk Windstein was a member of Down soon thereafter, which started the change in my position.  I had a couple of their later albums and a compilation that featured a number of tracks from various early releases, but never had any of their earlier full-lengths.  I tracked down this one because I had a decent idea of what to expect.

As would be expected for one of the progenitors of the sludge metal genre, this album is deliberately paced with devastatingly heavy riffs.  The riffs are not the only thing that is devastating however.  Crowbar's lyrics have often centered around personal pain and strife, and that is no exception with this album.  Songs like the title track, "Through a Wall of Tears" and "Embracing Emptiness" are musical exercises in futility.  The minor keys and bluesy sound of the riffs add to the overall misery seeping through each song.  This is some very dark stuff.

No discussion of Crowbar would be complete without discussing the work of its only permament member, Windstein.  His vocals are painful, adept at expressing frustration, sadness and anger all at once.  He is truly a one-of-a-kind vocalist who many have attempted to emulate but have not come close. 

This is one of the classic Crowbar releases, and for damn good reason.  Every song is powerful and the band members play off each other quite well.  This is one of the better examples of sludge metal that focuses more on the doom metal side of things.  This is a genre-defining classic.