Album Review: Code Orange – Underneath


Underneath




One of the most (or least, based on what you think) appealing of metal’s qualities is its vast, elephantine sub-genres which seem both to interlock and overlap.

By its nature, this is a global honeycomb of niches that deliberately try to shut themselves off from the outside world, so how do you solve the problems of encroachment, turf wars and unwritten codes of honour that erect barriers between people who are essentially listening to the same shit?

It’s quite simple: if you’re Code Orange you just make a record that incorporates many of them, flaunts heretical influences from the wider world, and then inject it with as much controlled aggression as you can muster. This is the pitch black essence of Underneath.

When we say pitch black, the Pittsburghers’ fourth album isn’t informed by cheesy, virgins-in-taffeta schlock, the horrors it deals with – isolation, paranoia, losses of control and the erasure of self-esteem – are all very modern, first world problems which dominate what is an unremittingly heavy record that is never just noise; with vocal duties shared between Jami Morgan and guitarist Reba Myers there is a strange sort of balance in the eye of the band’s chaotic storm.

Opener (deeperthanbefore) is a brief, jarring statement of intent, blasts of discord which sound like the warning siren before a demolition. After piercing screams, the listener is catapulted straight into the epic Swallowing The Rabbit Whole, Morgan shredding maniacally over ruined tempo changes, the shards precise and dangerous.

Respite from the nightmares he’s a slave of, partially caused by the unrelenting spotlight of the digital mirror society is addicted to, is to be taken on the run wherever it can be found: In Fear adds glitchy peaks of bled out static to the oppressive creepscape, the choked out words, ‘I’d do anything at all/Just to cut the legs off/A man swallows his son/The son meets the boogeyman’, patrolling both sleep and wakefulness.

Having begun as teenagers, the band are now still only in their mid-20s, still desperately young to be so damaged; even on the relatively unhazed Sulfur Surroundings, about the toxicity of bad relationships with Myers on lead, which is as unconventional a ballad as you’ll hear, while The Easy Way channels Downward Spiral-era Nine Inch Nails expertly, the industrial ripple of synths mimicking the winds of both cruelty and compassion at the same time.

This is sociopathy twisted but given brutal wings, an odyssey into a generation never out of the firing line. It peaks with the swampy, rolling crunch of Autumn And Carbine and the titular closer, a song raised up on punishing blocks, an electronic soup with a chorus made for huge audiences and post-millennial mind-rioters everywhere.



Code Orange have made a record which takes them above their past, and Underneath is written in a language that anyone who has ever lived uncomfortably with themselves will know. In fusing the essence of metal’s tribes together, it’s the infectious howl of a band now ready for mass appeal.

8/10

Andy Peterson


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