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THE NEW CODE ORANGE ALBUM IS MORE MELODIC, BUT DEVILISHLY HEAVY…
Code Orange are one of the mostexciting names to emerge in heavy music over the last decade. In new album The Above, guitarist Reba Meyers combines clean melodies with the sound of “pure evil”…
This album feels more positive, almost more hopeful, than your previous records.
It’s definitely more melodic. That was always inside of me as a writer, but within the context of the band, it wasn’t always necessarily appropriate. Now we’re all a bit more grownup, I’m able to just go for it. People sometimes confuse those cleaner sections as a ’90s thing and I don’t see it that way. They hear a good rock guitar sound and say, ‘Oh, it’s like the ’90s!’ But I’m like, ‘No, it’s just a good guitar sound!’ I don’t want to connect our stuff with being part of some sort of revival.
There’s still a lot of clashing dyads and tritone stabs in the heavy parts, to be fair!
Those stabs are so percussive, evoking this sense of anger and hatred against the drums. I’ve been doing that since we were kids. I don’t know where it came from but it will never leave my arsenal. And the tritone is called the devil’s interval because back in medieval times people considered it to be pure evil. It’s wild that when I was 10 years old, it created the same exact feelings in me even though I hadn’t heard it before. The human body seems to just connect darkness with that interval – it’s crazy!
You’ve used your EVH 5150III head along with various plug-ins over the years. What are we hearing on The Above?
It was definitely a mix-and-match recording process. I trusted my ears to go with what sounded best and ended
