Code Orange: Bleeding Through Blurred Lines on 'Forever'
Tuesday, 10 January 2017
Written by Alec Chillingworth
In its purest form, hardcore can be the most liberating, primal art you’ll ever come across. Minor Threat made you want to scream at a wall. Black Flag made you want to damage inanimate objects. Sick Of It All would make most unsuspecting civilians vomit on the spot. It’s a dangerous, bare-knuckle sport that contends with the fastest bands thrash has to offer and the ugliest, coldest of black metallers.
A problem that seems to arise for most hardcore bands, though, is that it’s seen as a restrictive genre and, as time goes on, a regressive one. There is usually that initial burst of youthful, snot-speckled perfection before artists begin delving into other territories, whether for artistic or commercial gain. The limits placed on hardcore by those inside and outside the scene stretch beyond the music, too, and the very idea of signing to a major label is still seen as ‘selling out’ in 2017. Some bands’ attitudes towards success remain depressingly conservative given the liberal nature of the music.
You’ve got a handful of acts who have always been happy to buck trends, though. Converge started as a hardcore band and expanded their palette over the years, pulling from all manner of influences to bolster their root sound and stay achingly relevant for over two decades. They became the gold standard, the albatross around hardcore’s tattooed neck. Until now.
Because Code Orange have recorded what is quite possibly the best hardcore record (rock record, metal record, whatever you want to call it) of 2017. It’s only January, but fuck it. It’s that good. Having dropped their Code Orange Kids moniker prior to releasing 2014’s beast of a sophomore LP ‘I Am King’, the Pittsburgh quartet have spent the past few years being feted by the music media at large and touring with At The Gates, Slayer, Deftones, King Diamond and more. The results are plain to see.
“I think the weird part was just that people paid attention at all,” admits drummer Jami Morgan. “We’ve been around for a long time and the weird part was how the shows changed overnight and became really good because before, they really weren’t. The first show we played [for ‘I Am King’] had a different vibe.”
Another weird part was the band’s appearance at the UK’s Download Festival in 2015. Rocking up on the third stage, Morgan, guitarists Reba Myers and Eric Balderose and bassist Joe Goldman found themselves facing a slot just prior to a not-so-secret set by spandex-heavy rockers the Darkness, a band whose sexcentric eccentricities completely contradict the stark bile of Code Orange’s music.
“I saw some crazy shit going on backstage but dude, our goal is just to be hyper focused,” Morgan says of the gig. “I saw them backstage and there’s this charade that they’ve got going on and that’s cool. It was definitely different but we try not to get too sucked into that stuff. We belong [on that stage] so people will pay attention to our shit. If you don’t think that way then you just become another band alongside another million bands on the bill. You need to have confidence and deliver. We had a big crowd. There were definitely people on the outskirts who were just waiting for the Darkness, but we had a lot of fans moshing and stuff. I really wanna play that thing again, it was fucking awesome.”
Judging by Code Orange’s recent dalliances, it seems like a return to mainstream rock festivals isn’t out of the question. ‘Forever’ is being released by Roadrunner Records after the band put out their first two LPs with Deathwish, the hardcore label founded by Converge vocalist Jacob Bannon and Tre McCarthy. We’re talking the Roadrunner Records that looks after Nickelback, Slipknot and other platinum-selling bands.
But, before you denounce Code Orange as sell-outs and demand they hand in their hardcore cards, just think about that for a minute. In the ‘80s, the label hunted out the most furious strains of death metal, bringing us Obituary, Sepultura and so on. In the ‘90s, Roadrunner became an iron-clad institution that looked after big-hitters while taking on bands ranging from Madball to Suffocation and even Front Line Assembly. And here in 2017, the label that was so influential back in the day is putting its money where its mouth is, having scooped up Creeper, Marmozets, Turnstile and now Code Orange.
“We approach things like this with caution,” Morgan says of signing with the label. “We were only gonna do something like that if were able to have complete control over our creative situation, and we’ve been given that. It’s been awesome so far and it’s a pretty legendary label.”
This creative dexterity has bubbled all the way down to who’s twiddling the knobs, with Will Yip and Converge’s Kurt Ballou both producing on ‘Forever’. Ballou’s been on board since the Code Orange Kids days, but Yip’s got previous, too. His work spans records by Paint It Black, Turnstile and Title Fight, while he also produced ‘Supersonic Home’, the 2015 debut LP by Goldman, Meyers and Morgan’s rock side project Adventures. Their skills combine to mirror Code Orange’s revised goals.
“Will did all the Title Fight records and he’s done a bunch of other stuff in the more, like, ‘rock’ world,” Morgan says. “He’s very much like Kurt. He works with all the young bands. He’s such a creative, smart dude and we knew we wanted to have different elements and shit on ‘Forever’. We wanted our record to be about the ‘now’, so we wanted to get the two best ‘now’ guys around. Kurt recorded all the heavy music then Will layered it up, so we got the best of both worlds. They’re just the two best guys and they represent 2016’s best people and that’s what we wanted to do. We didn’t want to delve into big producers and shit. We wanted to use the two best guys to create something current.”
And current it is. ‘Forever’ is miles away from ‘I Am King’ in terms of quality, and that record was a beast in its own right. Code Orange have done exactly what Morgan suggests, stretching their sound further than ever before without betraying their roots. That sounds like the horrible ‘heavier yet more melodic’ cliché, but on this occasion it’s true. Real descends into filthy metalcore fury, Hurt Goes On is a disturbing, stomping industrial number and Ugly is a nigh-on post-punk track, bouncing into a throaty chorus that’s an unapologetic earworm. ‘Forever’ fucks with what your idea of what a hardcore record should be because it’s not really a hardcore record. It’s a Code Orange record.
“We’re creating the idea of what a Code Orange album is and what Code Orange means. You’re not gonna be able to boil it down to just one thing,” Morgan explains. “We want to have our own brand of doing that. In the past we just kinda smacked stuff together, and that’s because we’re influenced by a lot of chaotic bands. I think now we’ve figured out how to do it in our own way. You can’t listen to our shit and say it sounds like somebody else. You can say certain parts might remind you of something, but we’ve definitely created our own thing. If we’re not, then there’s no point. We never wanna lose the hard aspect, like a lot of bands do. When they try to change, the hard aspect is the first thing to go.”
Even on the album’s most surprising moment, Bleeding In The Blur, the sense of identity is never lost. It is a disgustingly dark alternative rock song written by a metalcore band. With Meyers utilising a rare clean vocal - akin to Dreams In Inertia from ‘I Am King’ - Bleeding In The Blur is, as Morgan so wonderfully puts it “like if Nirvana were fucking evil”.
It pushes the envelope so far that it escapes the Post Office. It’s so radically different to Code Orange as we know them, but so is the sleazegrinding The New Reality and a title track that could spar with Gojira. Bleeding In The Blur is just another facet to the record, with its cleaner edges amplifying the already heavy material further.
“Bleeding In The Blur was the second song we wrote. The first song we wrote was Forever,” Morgan says. “We did it how we always do it. We write four songs which represent the four corners of what we wanna do. We like to cover the full court. The corners are what our plan is and then we build all that up. We just wanted to write a fucking dark, brooding, badass song. I think it could probably reach out to more people than just our audience, but the main thing to know is that Bleeding in The Blur was gonna happen no matter what label we were on. We’ve always edged that [melodic] stuff in, but then you listen to some other parts of the record and it’s the hardest shit we’ve ever done. The whole thing is a mindfuck and that’s the way we wanted it to be.”
Even through the muddy, unrealised mire of Code Orange Kids’ early material, there was always a spark, always a glimmer of something spectacular waiting to happen. Morgan puts it down to the fact that “now we can write better songs” and that seems like a fair summation. Code Orange Kids were still in education while churning out the most heinous noise imaginable in between semesters. In 2017, they’ve matured into everything you want and need from a rock band. They’re intelligent but brutal. They’re metal as fuck but capable of displaying the rawest, most naked emotions. They’re a terrifyingly in-your-face live band but some of the loveliest, most down-to-earth people you’d chance upon. Above all, though, they’re a band that knows they’re good and they want to let everyone else know about it.
“I know what our situation is,” Morgan muses. “But we just don’t give a fuck, honestly. I’m gonna say what I want to say and it is what it fucking is. People can twist it and say we’re arrogant or whatever, but none of us are fucking arrogant. We have confidence in what we do, we have high aspirations and nobody can convince me that there’s anything wrong with that. They can try, but none of us are gonna listen. They’ve always been trying. I like the pressure.
“We just wanna take a new path and hopefully get out there to more people, but we’re never gonna abandon the kind of music we’ve come from. We’ll never stop supporting it and we’ll never stop playing it. I just think that naturally, as we get better, our songs do appeal to more people. We’re fuelled by accomplishing new things. When it becomes stale and just the same old shit, just album number whatever of the same old shit, then the vibe’s gone and you’re just making 40 new t-shirts that all look different. That’s not what we want. We want a strong vibe and a strong confidence in what we’re doing. There’s a spot for what we’re doing and, in our minds, it’s needed. This band’s been our whole lives since we were 15. I think that people will see that. Or maybe they won’t, but it is what it fucking is and I feel very good about the record.”
You can’t sit on this album. You can’t let it pass you by. Rock music has been severely lacking in terms of genuinely heavy acts balancing the weight of mainstream success with creative quality in recent years. Unless Venom Prison get snapped up by Universal in the immediate future, Code Orange are the best example of that happening on a grassroots scale. And then who knows? This band started out as a high-school project and, nearly a decade later and three albums in, they’ve crafted a future classic album and released it on a major label.
“We were young, hardcore punk kids, so our goal was just: 'We’d love to play one crazy hardcore show where people actually gave a shit,’” Morgan concludes. With ‘Forever’ under their belts, he’d best get ready, because a lot of people are about to give a shit about Code Orange. This year belongs to them.
'Forever' is out on January 13 through Roadrunner Records
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