Review by Ben for Dark Angel - Time Does Not Heal (1991)

Time Does Not Heal is famous for the sheer number of riffs it contains. 246 to be precise. I have to say that doesn't impress me one little bit. If you fit 246 riffs into 9 songs, then those songs are very unlikely to be memorable and likely to vary in quality throughout. And that's exactly what happened with this album. The sound that Dark Angel created was solid and all the band members do what they set out to do well. But there just isn't all that much to hang onto and the massive length of the album leads to boredom by about halfway through. Metallica got away with writing long songs filled with riffs through damn good song writing and an ability to change things up throughout. But Dark Angel don't have as many weapons to play with and end up with 70 minutes of decent riffs thrown together.

If I listen to singular songs, then I quite enjoy Time Does Not Heal, Act of Contrition, Psychosexuality and A Subtle Induction. In fact, there aren't any moments on the album that are particularly bad, but with 8 out of 9 tracks going over the 6-minute mark and 3 of them over the 8-minute mark, they just don't have enough going for them to keep my interest for the whole running time. With a little bit of culling and a little more creativity, this album could have been on par with their classic Darkness Descends. As it is, I'm not sure how often I could get all the way through Time Does Not Heal.