Review Summary: Captivating, painstaking and utterly, utterly brutal
Pittsburgh metalcore group Code Orange have always been about experimentation and change. From the bizarre song titles on their debut album
Love is Love // Return To Dust to dropping the “Kids” from their name, they aren’t going to just sit down and accept the hardcore scene as it is. They want to be something more, something ambitious. “In a world of servants and liars and spies, I am king” they scream on the titular track.
I Am King is an ambitious record, and a downright heavy one at that.
Right from the opening few seconds of the album (extremely loud walls of distortion which cut off and on again without warning), Code Orange blow the listener away in terms of sheer power. The sludgy guitar tones and technical drumming shows clear influences from late 90’s and early 00’s bands like Norma Jean; it should come as no surprise that Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou produced the album. But Code Orange are more than just a carbon copy of nostalgic metalcore. Whereas Converge can feel erratic and scrappy, Code Orange are methodical. Every passage seems precisely thought-over, every breakdown meticulously planned out. The vocal performances, split between guitarists Reba and Eric and drummer Jami, are barely intelligible but drip raw intensity. The result of this is one of the most violent albums you’ll listen to in a while. There’s barely a moment over the 33 minute runtime where you won’t want to flail your limbs around in a pit and start attacking the nearest person. Despite this, there’s something distinctly arresting about the album. It’s like a car crash: it’s a horrifying sight, but you can’t quite seem to keep your eyes off of it.
There’s more to this album than ferocity though. This is perhaps best shown on the third track "Dreams In Inertia", a song that no doubt stems from the group’s other project Adventures. Initially it can feel like the song, with a dreamy shoe-gaze and post-rock atmosphere, would be more at home on a My Bloody Valentine record than on this, but on repeated listens it begins to fit into
I Am King. It provides a gateway into the harrowing world of Code Orange: sinister, unpredictable and genuinely scary.
I Am King probably won’t change hardcore forever. For all of their worth, each ruthless track starts to roll into another. There’s nothing spectacular about songs like "Thinners Of The Herd" or "Starve" to make them stand out from the rest, but this is certainly a record that deserves listening to. It’s impressive for a very young band that has only one other album. If Code Orange continue to create albums as interesting and entrancing as this, who knows: maybe one day, they will become kings.
