Review: Uniform Finds Ambition and Vulnerability on American Standard
While Uniform originated as frontman Michael Berdan and guitarist Ben Greenberg playing bonafide industrial music, the duo’s expanded musical vision led to an expanded lineup. Now a five-piece band with Mike Sharp (percussion, electronics), Michael Blume (drums) and Brad Truax (bass), Uniform’s caustic rage has driven them beyond genre confines. Whether programmed battery or distorted sludge, Berdan’s maniacal bellows become the glue holding each stylistic shift together. While the title American Standard might suggest a dialing back of sorts, suffice it to say Uniform hasn’t lost their appetite for difficult music. Even by industrial metal standards, this thing is all over the place.
Let’s start with the title track — a 20-minute monster with no fear of repetition. Repetition, and weirdness, considering the fact the track begins with two and a half minutes of Berdan screaming his brains out in a pulsing, chant-like diatribe. The instrumentation emerges akin to the more recent Swans albums, marinating on the same chord and relying on dynamics and nuanced layering of texture to keep things interesting. Also like Swans, the soundscapes become so immersive that even a slight change becomes a cathartic release, let alone a turn for doom metal at the mid-section. The decelerating filth shows what depths of heaviness Uniform can reach, but their daring decision to thrust upward at the last with a passionate surge of blackened shoegaze.
While certainly ambitious in its scope, its emotional breadth makes the time spent more than worth the effort. Lyrics like “There’s meat on my face, that hangs off my face, sweats like I sweat, cries like I cry” speak to the album’s theme of Berdan’s struggles with bulimia. His unfiltered vocal delivery, coupled with these raw lyrics, makes for an experience as harrowing as it is emotional.
With such a slow-burning beginning, the aggressive, tribal percussion of “This Is Not A Prayer” comes as a welcome change of pace. Simultaneously lumbering, yet explosively physical in its impact, the nuances of the beat derive from the fact it’s the result of two drummers bringing the most intensity from each other as they drive the song through its sludgy chords and shrill tremolo-picked dissonance. In these cases, Uniform retains an industrial flavor not through electronics, but by favoring the use of strange sound effects over traditional progressions. It’s like they want to avoid riffs while pushing the limits of their instruments to produce caustic abandon. This pares well with the unrefined vocal style, always featuring on the edge of noise… and at the last, it goes over the edge and embraces feedback layers and braying vocals over that relentless drum loop.
The way “Clemency” flows from droning plunderphonics to bombastic chaos shows just how tactful Uniform have become within this form. Not only that, but this song represents the most unabashedly sludge-core voyage this band has gotten to date. While still wretchedly repetitious in nature, the riffs tread the line between classic Godflesh and the slow-motion dread of Grief or Noothgrush for a violent dose of low-end battery. The more head-bangeable vibes also give Berdan more room to mix some more traditional metal screams into his delivery. Of course, the band remains grounded in grating drudgery, never fully giving itself over to orthodoxy in any form they experiment with.
Speaking of experimentation, the triplet cadences of “Permanent Embrace” morph its first moments to a demented waltz, but cares without warning into a wall of blast beats and minor key chord changes on pare with the industrial black metal elite (think Blut Aus Nord). Drastic dynamics shifts like this benefit greatly from being played by a real band instead of sequenced instruments. It doesn’t sound like a hodge-podge of vibes, because the chemistry between these musicians shows audible intent and depth. While Uniform still very much resembles the expected tenets of industrial metal, their commitment to traversing numerous shades of noisy brutality more than services this zealous project.
American Standard’s vulnerability remains palpable, surrounding Berdan’s struggles with bulimia. His pain certainly becomes evident as he shouts to his father, and by extension the world, “you found my love appalling.” Uniform may not have reinvented the wheel for this particular vein of noisy, angry, screamy guitar music, but they’ve certainly set a great standard for themselves this time around.
Uniform’s American Standard will release on August 23, and is available for pre-order at Sacred Bones Records.
