Hinge was a band that confounded me from the very start. This, their debut (and only?) album, materialized on the Pavement label – which had thus far famously delivered such revered NOLA metal greats as Crowbar, Stressball, and Tungsten (not to mention New Idol Son, Fear Of God, Demented Ted…and a sprawling list of other heavy stuff). Yet, when I flipped the disc over and saw the band photo, I simply wasn’t prepared to make sense of this rag-tag crew of collegiate-looking doofuses.
I’m finding very little history or online info on the band, except for a few Amazon.com reviews mistakenly pegging them as the early incarnation of Dry Kill Logic. Worth noting: Hinge were guilty of the mid 90s trend of having mostly single word song titles (“Quirky”, “Form”, “Rest”, “Roar”) and the album had loose, understated “jam session” sonics, which made me associate them with other stuff I was “sort of” enjoying back then (like Iceburn, Laundry, and Sausage).
Hinge seemed to have similar impact on the rest of the metal community – and admittedly this long-lost disc has haunted me over the years: a vague impression that nagged for a revisiting. So, when I found this one for a buck at a nearby thrift, it was time to try it again.
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Well, hopefully your revisitation with AMOM was a pleasant one. I was the drummer on the disc, (along with my friend Tim Lieder) and sadly it was the only HINGE recording. If you did enjoy it, then you might enjoy the musical stylings of Gondolier, a band consiting of 2 former Hingenites; Matt P and Lee O. Oustanding music.
We never really liked the AMOM recording, and it was a crap representation of our live shows that had a lot of energy.
We are all still friends, and might one day make music together (most of us any way.)
So if you were wondering, now you know.
oh, for sure – the Hinge disc is great, i’d recommend it to anyone. That was a memorable era for heavy music..a lot of the genres were just beginning to “cross-pollinate” and it was liberating – as a serious ’80s metal fan – to see bands like Hinge. The “indie” metal labels then were faced with either sticking with ordinary thrash / black / grind stuff….or bravely opening doors. I think Hinge was a humble (but important) move toward the future.
I will check out Gondolier and thank you for the visit and the update!
Just throwing in my 2 cents worth here. First I am totally thrilled that you took the time to review us here, thanks so much. 15 years later or so and living out here in Arizona I have to look back on what we did in retrospect, some good times and some bad, bad mostly because of the crappy reputation that the Pavement label (ironically moving to Arizona shortly after I did, and eventually changing to CRASH Recordings) put on us, good because I can’t remember a more satisfying and exciting time in my life thus far. I played guitar in Hinge and was hoping for a recovery from the poorly produced AMOM album, but our quirky singer stopped us dead in our tracks by dropping the “I’m just not feeling this right now” bomb on our fun little group with a few shows pending. We winged our last two shows without him, one in Windsor, Canada, where we were starting to get airplay on college radio, and another show at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He rejoined us for a final show at a coffee house in Ypsilanti, and I had to restrain myself from using my Gibson RD as a head chopping ax on him, seriously.
It really sucked that we could not keep going without him, but the music writing was going in a different direction, mostly due to some ego-head bullshit from our other guitarist, and our drummer’s decision to quit because he could not come up with beats and rhythms to epic songs with 15 different parts, I digress a little. It is my opinion that if we were able to balance the music writing out and get a new singer we would have been able to fulfill our 7 record deal with Pavement, no such luck. We were receiving awesome response from fans close to the end and comparisons to Sunny Day Real Estate and even having some success in Australia thanks to a European rep from the label’s connections.
We surely would have shined with a producer like Steve Albini or Ted Nicely, but the labels choice of Jim Faracci was totally an accidental meeting of stale glam-metal, although he was cool to hang out with. You would think he would have used his gold-finger touch or at least some sort of satanic metal mojo to make us sound incredible, like he did with Poison and Ratt, but as we recorded it was obvious that our tastes in music and production were too far apart. Law suits followed, and he barely got paid without legal assistance. Our master reels are locked in a vault at Zoo Entertainment along with Tool and Matthew Sweet, and other great stuff, and for that I am proud. Its also nice to read reviews like yours and others that compare us to Monster Magnet, Kyuss, and the Toadies. Thanks again, man. Lookout for a reunion of some of the ex-Hinge members sometime, or a Rick Rubin re-mix of “A-Major 7th” or “Roar”. Increase the peace, Patrick
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