Review Summary: "See the world with Code Orange vision"
Code Orange have become one of the most divisive bands in heavy music. For every devoted fan who would die in their honor, there’s an equal amount of people who will follow them to the grave insisting that they peaked when they were Code Orange Kids. This is largely due to how the band drastically changes its sound with each album; whatever you think is the best Code Orange album is largely reflective of your personal taste in music.
I Am King serves as a soft reboot of Code Orange, dropping the “Kids” moniker and stripping away the post metal elements that appeared on
Love Is Love//Return to Dust in order to solidify a metalcore foundation to build off of for future releases. This is Code Orange’s most no-frills release, but as a result, I feel it gets lost in the shuffle when discussing the band’s discography. It lacks the industrial experimentation that made
Forever and
Underneath stand out while failing to capture the “what could’ve been” mystique of
Return to Dust.
I Am King is mostly seen as an ordinary hardcore record, but I think there’s more to this album than just being a Disembodied rip-off. There’s a reason the highest viewed videos on Deathwish’s YouTube channel are
I Am King related.
The first thing that engulfs the listener is how meaty the production is. Kurt Ballou takes the helm here, and provides Code Orange with some of the best production of his entire career, rivaling anything he’s done with Converge. The snare hits like you slammed a door so hard you broke the doorframe, the guitars pierce through your skull, and every song is caked with Joe Goldman’s gunk ridden bass. This album sounds like it was buried in the middle of a field, with every crevasse of the CD case filled with dirt. The band makes fertile use of Ballou’s bedrock; second single “Dreams of Inertia” is a sludge metal masterpiece that submerges itself in its own aura and is guided by the band’s alluring yet ominous vocals. Despite being the outlier on the album, “Dreams of Inertia” makes you appreciate the album’s atmosphere even in its most aggressive moments. In such cases, like the breakdowns to both “Alone In A Room” and “Slowburn”, you can see why the band embraced industrial elements on
Forever. Code Orange are masters at creating a world, and the fact that they were able to conjure this convincing of an atmosphere without the use of electronic elements is a testament to the band’s skills as world builders.
Another layer to
I Am King’s sound is how the band utilizes vocals. It is without a doubt in my mind that Code Orange provide some of the best vocal performances in metal. Yes, their vocals here sound a bit inexperienced compared to the likes of
Underneath, but they make up for it by sounding absolutely f
ucking brutal. They’re just screaming their heads off with an almost murderous level of tenacity. What truly makes the vocals stand out as the band’s secret weapon is how they’re integrated into the songs. There are three vocalists in Code Orange: guitarist Reba Meyers takes charge of the higher pitched harsh vocals and hauntingly melodic singing, drummer Jami Morgan commands the mid-range, and guitarist Eric “Shade” Balderose holds down the low-end guttural vocals. With songs like “Unclean Spirit”, “Starve”, and “Your Body is Ready…”, it’s enthralling to listen to the three of them tag in-and-out of vocal duties like a roving pack of hyenas. Guest vocalists also show up, mainly to throw off the listener before piledriving them with a breakdown. At no point do the vocals offer any sort of assurance, it’s just a relentless barrage that attacks the listener at every angle. Gang vocals aren’t an apt description, they’re straight up cult vocals.
That level of control is what makes
I Am King such a remarkably forward-thinking album both in the band’s discography and in the wider realm of hardcore. Due to the increased technicality of
Underneath, I understand why Jami Morgan would want to move away from drums and focus on his vocal abilities. The fact that it was such a smooth transition is still impressive, but man, he was a hell of a drummer. Every tempo shift, time signature change, and sudden pause is accounted for, and on songs like the title track and “My World”, he knows when to keep a steady groove and when to shift gears. The band overall has a lot of tricks up their sleeves. Up until
Underneath, technicality is something Code Orange had struggled with, and so much of the charm of
I Am King comes from the band overcompensating for this fact. While the only thing resembling
Return to Dust on this album is the ringing alarm in “Slowburn”, I Am King does capture what made
Return to Dust special. Namely that they showcase a scrappy young band circumventing their limitations by throwing everything they have at you in the hopes that it would stick, and in the case of
I Am King, nearly all of it sticks. From its atmosphere, to its layered vocals, to its lurches in rhythm,
I Am King operates at a level of precision that most hardcore bands could only dream of.
Normally an album review wouldn’t spend a lot of time discussing a band’s music videos, but in Code Orange’s case, their music videos are an important aspect to the band’s artistry. Apart from being some of the most creative music videos in all of heavy music, they’re also important for fleshing out the Code Orange Cinematic Universe. The video for the title track shows three people taking a fourth person to be sacrificed in the middle of the field, carving the acronym “TOTH” into his back. The human sacrifice is referred to by the band as “The Mudman”, who will show up as a recurring character in Code Orange’s music videos and promotional material. The “TOTH” acronym also shows up in the warped VHS styled video for “Dreams of Inertia”. It’s a reference to the song “Thinners of the Herd”, which is a microcosm of everything that makes this album great. The song rides a churning polyrhythmic beat that builds to a climax that gradually increases in tempo, until it explodes into a whirlwind of feedback and screaming. The title refers to their fanbase who, by supporting the band, are weeding out the mediocrity that surrounds them. It’s essentially the group’s version of Slipknot’s maggots, and instantly sets up Code Orange as metal’s biggest heel. Whether or not you approve of their self-aggrandizing theatrics is besides the point, the amount of foresight needed to set all this up is staggering.
I Am King does more in just over 30 minutes than what most bands could accomplish in an hour. The album’s straightforward approach belies a level of craft and attention to detail that feels rewarding, especially to those who have seen this band grow more ambitious with every release. None of the experimentation of
Forever and
Underneath would be as impactful if
I Am King didn’t lay the groundwork for those albums to flourish. This is more than just another hardcore record, this is the indoctrination of new leadership.
