Code Orange - Forever

Pitchfork 75

A warning to the Warped set: The band once known as Code Orange Kids are children no longer. The Pittsburgh savants—musical partners since high school, barely legal at the time of their 2012 signing, long barred from the club circuit due to their age—have certainly paid their dues. They’ve spent the past decade plotting and pummeling their way from the hardcore underground to rock’s MainStage, touring with everyone from Full of Hell and Touché Amoré to Deftones and the Misfits and recording under the guidance of two of the most respected luminaries in their genre. Their first two albums (2012’s Love Is Love // Return to Dust and 2014’s I Am King) were released on Converge frontman Jacob Bannon’s Deathwish Inc. label, and produced by his bandmate Kurt Ballou, one of metal’s most highly-regarded board wizards. And yet, even as they stay the course, the group continue to grapple with their precocious past, leading some to reframe them as interlopers, snooty art school kids trying to act tough.

Certainly, Code Orange’s aesthetic and presence involve plenty of mean mugging: grisly music videos and artwork, on-the-record refusals to tour with acts they consider “bargain-bin deathcore bands,” unflinching accounts of in-studio fist fights, vows of Darwinist vengeance against the “fake rockstar mentality” espoused by scene hotshots like Asking Alexandra (“They will be the first to go,” the self-proclaimed “thinners of the herd” stated ominously in a Facebook post). With their third LP and major-label debut Forever, Code Orange have offered up compelling, caustic–occasionally, even catchy–evidence that their claims of intra-scene superiority are, for the most part, justified.

Despite all this talk, the Code Orange crew's approach is surprisingly communal. There’s no bandleader to speak of; instead, we’ve got a vocal tag-team between drummer Jami Morgan and guitarists Reba Meyers and Eric Balderose, the latter of whom’s on power electronics duty as well. They’re less a trio than a cacophonous hydra fighting with itself, each head bearing a distinctive battle cry: Morgan’s razor-throated yelps and deadpanned raps; Meyers’ piercing shrieks, alternated with the haunting alto typically reserved for her pop-punk side project, Adventures; and Balderose’s guttural death growls. This multivalence is partially to blame for the album’s erratic atmosphere; rather than reconcile these disparate approaches, the band duke things out in turn, leaving the guitar hooks (and Joe Goldman’s unfussed, even-keel bass playing) to tie everything together. Sometimes, a twisted choir forms: the half-sung, half-shouted chorus of “The Mud” for instance, or the end of “Hurt Goes On.”

There are many moments on Forever when the band momentarily vanishes for a few voiceless, riffless seconds, before re-materializing with axes in hand. These trap-door jump-scares are a staple in Code Orange’s live show; they turn mosh pits into fever swamps, making you doubt it you’ll make it out of the venue alive. Unfortunately, they fail to generate that level of excitement on record, killing the momentum on tracks like “Kill the Creator” and “The Mud” just as the band hit their stride. Even with Ballou and Will Yip (La Dispute, Touché Amoré) behind the boards, the Reznor-ian scare tactics grow wearisome, especially on “Hurt Goes On,” a Downward Spiral case study dragged down by Morgan’s stale sneers—“Mentally,” he drones flatly at one point, as if reading from a highway sign, “I want to hurt you mentally”—followed by (you guessed it) more silence.

High-definition production and label home aside, Forever is hardly the platonic ideal where heavy-metal crossovers are concerned. Its 11-track, 35-minute runtime proves an abrasive, acerbic listen from start to finish, firmly situating it within the burned wheelhouse occupied by bands like Nails and Knocked Loose, as opposed to, say, Nothing’s big-tent breakthrough Tired of Tomorrow. There’s one notable exception, of course: “Bleeding In The Blur,” a grungy ballad carried by Meyers’ clean vocals which features a head-spinning guest solo from Sumerlands’ Arthur Rizk. That the album’s biggest shot at a radio hit functions as a venomous kiss-off to all the scene snobs who wrote them off (“You’re bleeding into the blur/You’re dying in a ditch/Paint the picture how you want/It’s yours to make fit”), not to mention a formal fiat against Asking Alexandria and company (“Faith in numbers on the paper/the view will never change/constructed just to fill the void, you oil the machine”) only reiterates what we, and the band, knew all along: the heavy rock mainstream could use a good razing, and Code Orange are well-equipped for the demolition job.