Band:	Charred Walls Of The Damned
Album:	Cold Winds On Timeless Days
Style:	US power metal, Thrash metal
Release date:	October 2011

01. Timeless Days
02. Ashes Falling Upon Us
03. Zerospan
04. Cold Winds
05. Lead The Way
06. Forever Marching On
07. Guiding Me
08. The Beast Outside My Window
09. On Unclean Ground
10. Bloodworm
11. Admire The Heroes
12. Avoid The Light

If there was ever an album to symbolize a good chunk of Ripper Owens career, this would be it. As a vocalist, he's more than capable, and he has had his number of high moments, but never really anything all that amazing, he's a man known better for his talents than any type of legacy with dynamite albums. Cold Winds On Timeless Days is similar - it has some really interesting moments, but they are too frequently diluted by those utterly boring in-between minutes.

Let's not be mistaken, though - this band is primarily put together by drummer Richard Christy and guitarist Jason Suecof, which is kind of odd, all things considered, as most of the highs on this album are courtesy of Tim Owens. It's a fairly typical sort of hyper-aggressive sounding US power metal. If it weren't for the vocals, this album wouldn't have the identity that it does. Sure, there's a small handful of neat-o melodic leads, but too frequently they're augmented by the generic riff work.

Here's the kicker; the latter half of the album actually really picks up the slack. It seems like the song placement precisely reflect the order in which they were written. It's almost as if they realized how aimless, anticlimactic and dry they were sounding somewhere around the first half of "Lead The Way", then got their shit together. That makes this an incredibly difficult album to get into; it takes a little over 4 full songs before the whole thing really picks up. When they do, however, the riffs are juicy, the leads are massive, and the vocals no longer have to carry the whole thing, but rather soar over top as icing on the cake.

Unfortunately, even with the stronger songs being presented in the second half, there's still some weaker moments frequently dispersed. Had the first half of the album been absent of those parts then they would be a little more digestible; every album has some low-key moments that aren't so good, but when you've finally waded through over 20 minutes of that crap already, it's a little tiring to have to sit through more.

Had Cold Winds On Timeless Days been cut down to a lean, mean 40 minutes, we may have had one hot album on our hands here, the additional 20ish minutes of completely asinine song writing however is a bit much to handle.