For Uniform, heavy music is a means to confront the most difficult experiences in life. A case in point is the 21-minute title track of the noise-rock band’s fifth studio album, American Standard, on which Michael Berdan screams about his dissociation from his body: “A part of me! But it can’t be me!…There’s meat on my arms! There’s meat on my legs!”
Berdan’s vocal style draws from hardcore punk and black metal—a means, first and foremost, to express pain and rage—and American Standard is best understood in conjunction with the singer’s recent essay about his struggle with bulimia. The album’s title comes from a brand of toilets, over which Berdan says that he’s spent hours vomiting.
The title track, which comprises more than half of American Standard’s runtime, is a frightening master class in hypnotic monotony. The mix conjures the grayness of depression, eliminating the distinctions between vocals, guitars, keyboards, bass, and drums. Everything becomes a sludgy drone, as though the band were repeating a brief loop ad nauseam. Even when guitar riffs or drum fills break out, they’re immediately submerged in a morass of sound.
While the second half of “American Standard” is more varied, with drummers Mike Sharp and Michael Blume sticking to hi-hats for extended stretches and even some unaccompanied guitar for a few seconds, the song’s grim, sludgy sound becomes more harrowing. Though Uniform got its start making industrial metal with a tinny drum machine, guitarist Ben Greenberg’s day job as a recording studio engineer has paid off in his masterfully thick production.
The three remaining tracks on American Standard pick up the tempo. On “This Is Not a Prayer” and “Permanent Embrace,” Sharp and Blume create syncopated, goth-like rhythms with their tom-toms, while the latter adds some variety via a long synth passage. The mood doesn’t exactly lighten up, but these songs are more approachable, letting in a bit more open space.
Ultimately, though, American Standard offers no answers to the cycle of pain it represents. By the end of the closing track, the album relapses into a suffocating panic. But that may be a virtue. If ever an album resisted sinking into algorithmic complacency and insisted on confronting the demands that drove its creation, this is it.
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