Pressure the Hinges — Haste the Day

Pressure the Hinges is Haste the Day's third album, released on Solid State Records on March 20, 2007. It's thirteen songs in about forty-eight minutes, and it's the first record the Indiana band made with Stephen Keech on lead vocals. We give it a 7/10.

How it came together

Haste the Day formed in Carmel, Indiana, in 2001. They took their name from a line in the old hymn "It Is Well with My Soul," and they'd made two albums for Solid State with Jimmy Ryan screaming up front, Burning Bridges in 2004 and When Everything Falls in 2005.

Then, in late 2005, Ryan told the band he was leaving. He got married, took a job at Tooth & Nail Records and started a new band, Trenches. His last show with Haste the Day was in Indianapolis on December 30, 2005. Plenty of bands fold at that point.

The rest of the group carried on with a European tour alongside the Juliana Theory and brought along Stephen Keech, the singer from the Denver band New Day Awakening. On February 23, 2006, the band said in a press release that Keech was their new full-time singer.

The line-up on Pressure the Hinges was Keech on lead vocals, Brennan Chaulk on clean vocals and rhythm guitar, Jason Barnes on lead guitar, Michael Murphy on bass and Devin Chaulk on drums and clean vocals. Garth Richardson, who'd produced When Everything Falls, came back to produce it with Ben Kaplan, who also engineered it. The album's own credits list Machine for the mix and UE Nastasi for mastering.

What it sounds like

The album opens with "Eye of the Needle," a short scene-setter of just over a minute, and then drops straight into the title track. Nick Wallace of Jesus Freak Hideout called "Pressure the Hinges" the standout song on the record, saying it "features just about everything the band has to offer," from clean vocals to growls driven by double bass drums.

The big change is the voice. Wallace said Keech has "a much different scream than Jimmy Ryan," and that it brings the sound together into "a much more mature blend than before." He heard a range that runs "from a high, almost screechy scream, to a low power growl," and said that range "sets him far above the status quo of hardcore vocalists."

What really carries the album, though, is the way the two voices rub against each other. Keech handles the screaming, and the Chaulk brothers handle most of the singing. Wallace thought the overlap of clean vocals and gritty screams was the main thing that set the record apart from the pile of other heavy releases that year.

"Stitches" is the curveball. Wallace said it "sounds like nothing else" on the album, because it starts out softly, unlike anything the band had recorded before. The calm doesn't last. Within thirty seconds, he wrote, "we are right back into the fire." It's the song they made a video for, and it's the one to start with if you're new to the band.

The record closes on "Chorus of Angels," the longest song here at just over six minutes.

What the critics said

Reviews in 2007 ran from warm to glowing. Jesus Freak Hideout gave it four and a half stars out of five, and Wallace's verdict was simple. "This record is exactly what Haste the Day needed in response to their recent lineup change," he wrote. He told longtime fans that "this is not the band you heard on Burning Bridges," but that the gritty guitars and dirty screams were still there.

The most enthusiastic review came from Denmark. Claus Melsen of Power of Metal scored it 94 out of 100 in May 2007 and opened with "I love this album!!!" He admitted that reading they were Christians had lowered his expectations, but the record surprised him. He found "no corny, preaching lyrics," well-produced and hammering songs, and vocals that were both melodic and aggressive. To his ears, the band sounded like 30 Seconds to Mars "gone thrashy." He thought the new singer was far better than the old one, and he picked out "Pressure the Hinges," "Stitches" and "Chorus of Angels" as the songs to hear first.

The faith in it

Haste the Day were a Christian band, but this album doesn't preach. Wallace said the spiritual content is "difficult to uncover" while it's "always lingering vocally." His example was "The Minor Prophets," which he read as a song about coming back to faith. One line asks God to "re-break the bone to assure the healing / so that we may know you again." Wallace said lines like that are hard to understand at first, but broken down they're "essentially a call to be molded by God."

That's the album's way with belief. It's there in the imagery of breaking and healing, and in a song title like "Akeldema," which echoes the field of blood in the Book of Acts. You have to listen for it.

Where it falls short

The weakness Wallace noticed most is sameness. Wallace said the guitar effects are "quite similar on almost every song," and that at times "it's hard to tell when a song has ended and a new song has begun." That's a fair complaint. Outside the title track, "Stitches" and the closer, the middle of the record can blur into one long run of riffs and breakdowns.

There's also a Solid State formula at work. Wallace said the band "lived up to the Solid State standard" of heavy breakdowns. That was a compliment in 2007, but it also means the album sounds a lot like its label-mates.

How it did

Pressure the Hinges debuted at No. 89 on the Billboard 200, selling about 10,000 copies in its first week, according to Billboard. A deluxe version came with three bonus songs and a DVD. The DVD had the band's earlier music videos, live footage from a show with Keech and footage from Ryan's last show with the band. One of the bonus songs, "Sea of Apathy," is the demo that became "White Collar."

The band spent the summer of 2007 on the Vans Warped Tour and toured with Atreyu. It was also the last album with Barnes. In July 2008 the band said he'd been asked to step down because he no longer shared the Christian faith, and Dreamer followed that October without him.

Our verdict

Pressure the Hinges is the sound of a band that should've fallen apart and didn't. Keech's arrival gave Haste the Day a wider and harsher voice, and the trade-off between his screams and the Chaulks' singing gives the best songs real lift. The middle stretch is samey, and it never quite escapes the label sound of its day. But the title track, "Stitches" and "Chorus of Angels" hold up, and the album did what it needed to do, proving there was life for Haste the Day after Ryan.

7/10

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