Code Orange - The Hurt Will Go On

Code Orange had a huge year last year, which bled into this year with the unprecedented Grammy nomination, touring with Meshuggah (and I was lucky enough to catch them on that tour), the release of their fantastically chaotic and melodic “Only One Way” single through Adult Swim, and now this surprise 3-track EP on which Corey Taylor is featured.
Well it wasn’t much of a surprise for those who went through the weird cryptic puzzle on their website, which hinted at something of the sort.
The two new songs on the album, “3 Knives”, and “The Hunt”, the latter of which features Corey Taylor continue the tend toward the more industrially glitchy side of Code Orange’s sound and production style. The songs still maintain the strong commitment to the strong metallic hardcore the band started with and came up on, but for all the visceral flair the industrial elements add to the band’s sound already, their greater prominence here feels like it is partly suffocating the organic ferocity that makes the band so captivating. It’s still intense, but the boiling of their blood feels more distant coming through the Reznor-like production.
“3 Knives” is the more sporadic of the two, but also the more tangibly hardcore, combining the raspy shouts of Jami Morgan with punchy guitar riffs syncopated with the drums and psychotic electronic bursts.
The more clanky bass-driven “The Hunt” sounds like it even takes a bit of influence from self-titled-era Slipknot, but at its tail end it dives deeper into the kind of wild industrial noise that has served to accent Code Orange’s violent pulses. It’s the less hardcore of the two, but it’s still full of familiar aggression and intimidation. Corey Taylor sounds a little out of place with his more clinically delivered low-growled vocals, but not enough to completely derail the song.
The remix of Forever’s “Hurt Goes On” adds a few more electronic melodies and noisy sections and pitch shifts a few segments of the song, but nothing that radically alters what the original did in the first place.
It’s a pretty good addition to Code Orange’s catalog, and I’m glad the band are still pushing themselves not only to add to Forever (my album of the year last year), but to expand on what it did for them. They may have gone a little overboard on some of the industrial elements in a few places this time, but that’s the benefit of these one-off singles and EPs, the chance to experiment a bit with some new ideas before committing balls out to something still kind of experimental for the group on a full-length. Even as a tentative experimentation with such musical ideas, this EP captures quite well what has made Code Orange so electrifying and such a thrill to see hitting such high levels of success. The hunt is on indeed.

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