Haste The Day

Pressure The Hinges

Written by: PP on 23/04/2007 15:36:19

Haste The Day is a product of the development of the metalcore scene in the last decade or so. "Pressure The Hinges" is their third album yet, and the Swedish melodeath and American pop culture influences are still ever present in their sound, though in a perhaps less likable way than before. Their previous album "When Everything Falls", was released at what I consider the culmination year of metalcore (2005), and it was an excellent piece highlighting pretty much everything that was great in metalcore at the time. Since then, however, the genre has begun to slide down on an increasingly steep hill, and on "Pressure The Hinges" it is possible to see how it gets steeper, and steeper, and steeper.

Clean choruses, screamed/growled verses and complex guitars in a traditional verse/chorus structure - it's a formula that has become overused in recent years. It's a sign of oversaturation and mediocricy when as a reviewer you can't think much else to say about a band that they sound kinda like Atreyu now with their new vocalist, who utilizes a thrown up vocal style, and that they have added more clean melodic parts. I mean they have double-blast beat parts and availing guitars, but that's pretty much it. It's as generic metalcore as the new Atreyu album, and fails to integrate the same intensity and passion as their previous album did. In other words, Haste The Day has become more accessible to mainstream with the new album, but at what expense? Is this the way we really want our favorite genre to be displayed? "Pressure The Hinges" just gives more firepower to the denouncers of the genre.

But it's not all as bad as I make it sound. There are a couple of keepers on the album, like the clean-vocal led "Servant Ties", which breaks into the growled vocals only occasionally, or the post-hardcore influenced "Stitches". But still, you can't help but to think that with the addition of more clean vocals and the traditional metalcore style screams instead of the deeply tortured Zao-inspired ones, "Pressure The Hinges" has become more average rather than more interesting. It's worth checking out if you've sworn to metalcore, but otherwise, take into consideration my advice that there are much better albums in the genre released this year than Haste The Day's.

5

Download: Servant Ties, Pressure The Hinges
For the fans of: Atreyu, It Dies Today, As I Lay Dying
Listen: Myspace

Release date 20.03.2007
Solid State

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