Code Orange Kids - Love Is Love // Return To Dust
This album signals a bright future for the world of aggressive music.
rating: 5
Release date: November 20th FacebookTumblr*
Theres an impending zombie apocalypse or, as I type this, a supreme super-virus that will reduce us all to numb, lifeless remnants of skin and bones has taken to the air. Or a troupe of meteors or a bunch of skinny, eloquently limbed, pulsating bodied extra terrestrial beings are hurtling to our unchained planet and intent on smudging this idiotic rotating ball of green and blue to crumbs of grey, floating there in outer-space just like it was meant to be all those billions, trillions of years ago. Because 2012 is the year its all going to end. Havent you heard? On the 21st December, were all going to die or metamorphosize according to some. Those some being people who accept a range of eschatological beliefs where cataclysmic or transformative events will bring to an end a 5,125 year-long cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar or, if youre a (fake) Mayan then youll believe that 2012 is the year were all going to perish, burn, drown, suffocate, jump off buildings, vanish, get murdered, or hang ourselves. I say fake because there isnt actually any solid proof that the Mayans predicted this there isnt anything to verify this in the classic Maya accounts so I wouldnt worry too much. Carry on with your Christmas shopping, or your miserable 9-5, or injecting your veins with heroin. Its not as if a black hole is suddenly going to appear or a planet called Nibiru is going to suddenly appear and collide with us. And on that note, I need to stop reading so much about our approaching demise because its verging on OCD and I also need to start thinking about my Christmas shopping before I waste my money again on necessary things like nicotine and alcohol and a shitty phone bill. I mention about the end of the world because Code Orange is commonly known to be a message that booms out of a hospital public address system warning staff of: a bomb threat, a radioactive spill (turning us all into slimy green monsters), a person with mental health issues wandering loose in the corridors or an external disaster with mass casualties. And all of these aspects could relate to the end of the world. Yeah, even the person with mental health issues. They could be carrying a virus like off Carriers or something, any of us could, and when/if that happens, you know were all fucked. So, Code Orange Kids are a band who (possibly) have named themselves after acts of violence, aggression, control and annihilation. But theyre a product of these acts, as is obvious with the last word Kids. But the product often reaps in the precursors meaning and simply follows on from where they came. And this is undeniably true when referring to Code Orange Kids.
Formed in 2008 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the band say they started out playing really straightforward punk but after meeting former member, Bob Rizzo (guitar), their sound quickly hurtled into a much heavier direction and this resulted in the band describing themselves as doomy, abrasive hardcore punk thats influenced by scene heroes Black Flag, Converge and Integrity, amongst a host of others. The band are relatively young, and when they got signed to Deathwish Inc. in January 2012 the average age amongst the band was 18 years old. Thats everyones dream, right? To be in a band and to get signed by a label owned by one of your favourite bands vocalists (Jacob Bannon, Converge vocalist, owns Deathwish) would be like something youd think would never happen but thats exactly what happened to these guys. However, their young age did cause the band some trouble in their early days. As they all went to different high-schools in Pennsylvania, they could only tour between semesters and they also werent old enough to play at some clubs but they still managed to open for such bands as the Misfits, The Bronx, Nekromantix and Anti-Flag. The band have also toured with the likes of Touche Amore, Defeater, Birds In Row, Bane, Former Thieves, Polar and a whole lot more. Theyve also released 5 EPs, including Embrace Me/Erase Me (2011) and Cycles (2011). The way Id describe Code Orange Kids sound is as if youre having a nervous breakdown and the medication youre on works for a couple of seconds before the breakdown tears into your soul again and plunges its claws into your skull, shaking and slashing your brain, leaving the matter fusing to the inside of your skull and dribbling out of your ears. Suddenly, though, the medication has the desired effect and youre sat there, overwhelmed by whats just happened. Their sound is as about as angry and as aggressive as youll hear in the hardcore circuit this year, actually fuck that, their sound is as aggressive and diverse as any hardcore bands youll hear. And this, the bands debut album, signals a bright future for the world of aggressive music. We could even be looking at the band that nurtures hardcore into new beginnings. Love Is Love // Return To Dust begins with the dirges of Flowermouth (The Leech); throat-shredding, pulverising vocals, a grinding, sneering bass-line amalgamated by a cutting, chaotic wall of noise from the guitars is separated into slices of chaos and musical turmoil by controlling yet bewildered drums. http://youtu.be/SpVa-x7YndY As the album staccatos and crashes its way forward, we meet Liars // Trudge. The track bursts open with a grindcore/thrash feel, soon paring away for a doom-imbibed section where the bass plays king to the pawn that is the vocals, which struggle to clamber out of the fog the bass-line has cast. However, this only adds to the aggressiveness and fury of the track the vocals keep fighting to be heard and they shake away the fog to rise along with a commanding drumbeat. Then, the track takes a hairpin turn and is played out till the end in an ambient fashion, with an eerie and mystery-laden guitar picking away at the bines of the track while the female, clean vocals of Reba (guitar) bring to mind flickering home-made videos of colourless empty houses and bony trees and animals eyes blinking moonlight back at us from their night-time cubby hole. The track is possibly the strongest on the album, and is definitely one of the most difficult to categorise. Choices (Love Is Love) will get your head banging if it doesnt, youre listening to the wrong stuff and the soaring, wounding guitar is as nasty as youll hear on the album. The rolling bass-line, that embeds itself deep into the bowels of the track, along with the spiteful and pitiless vocals lurch around like some sort of jumping shadows. The drumming is akin to soldiers trudging their way through muddy fields, the emotion and passion that seeps out from each bang of the skin will leave you breathless and itching for more. The final track, Bloom (Return To Dust), encompasses the pure aggression, beautifully layered and unpredictable nature of the beast that Code Orange Kids have created. The track stumbles and bleeds into numerous musical edges art-rock, doom, punk, noise and you never know which angle the track is going to curve into next. The feral process of the whole album, and of the bands sound itself, is found in this final track and this shows the album is not just about aggressiveness and merging corners of genres; what the band have here is a piece of art. And this piece of art is one of the best, diverse and yet natural sounding albums of 2012. Buy it. Listen to it. Support. Nurture. Code Orange Kids are ready to imprint hardcore with new beginnings.