UNIFORM: AMERICAN STANDARD
ARCHIVED FROM LOUDER THAN WAR
Uniform: American Standard
LP | CD | DL
Uniform have surpassed their own ludicrously high sonic bar with their fifth album, American Standard.
Sometimes you can just feel it in your (sacred) bones; a release is special. Destined for greatness. Timeless. Uniform have gone and done it. They’ve delivered their magnum opus. Sean Millard explains why.
American Standard is so bleakly personal that it transcends genre and the boundaries of mere music reviews; it’s a confessional; a diary, a private journal so exposing that it would be magnetic and precious regardless of what it sounded like. Lucky for us, then, that the music that accompanies Michael Berdan’s brave and brutal words is just as raw, bloody and intense as the message it has been built to convey.
With each successive release, Uniform have grown. From the harsh lo-fi industrial noise rock of Perfect World that was refined somewhat for Wake in Fright to the breakthrough density of The Long Walk and anti-anthems of 2020’s Shame.
It was The Long Walk that made me a fan. The owner of my local record shop at the time, Beartree Records in Sheffield, announced proudly that he’d previewed the LP in store rather loudly and the sound made a small child burst into tears. I still think that tells you everything you need to know about Uniform’s dense sonic barrage.
Since then, with multiple of collaborations with The Body and, more recently, Boris, Uniform have become more difficult to pin down. Their intensity is always present, but their willingness to experiment has become just as engaging. Each release brings something new to the piss-soaked pity party and each release is more relished because of it.
But now they have given us American Standard.
Just four tracks. The title track taking up the entirety of side one. Two of the remaining three have been available online for a few weeks now too, so while at first, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s not a great deal of bang for your hard-earned buck, you could not be more wrong. In the flow of the album, both preview tracks Permanent Embrace and This Is Not A Prayer sound more substantial than they do on their own. Context is everything, dear, and the ordering of the tracks has been well considered, designed to immerse you most deeply in Berdan’s world of guilt, shame, self-loathing and bile.
Four tracks is perfect. It would be too emotionally exhausting with more.
The album begins with the most disturbing acapella ever committed to tape It recalls the oddness of Einstürzende Neubauten with its freakish call and response, delivered through a manic EQ sweep that sounds as fucked as Berden’s anguished exorcism of body dysmorphic pain.
The dissociative relationship he has with his physicality is immediately humbling in its honesty, tragic in its self-loathing and powerful in its profundity. Berdan wrote an essay for theQuietus to accompany this release, where he speaks honestly and bravely about his experiences with Bulemia Nervosa.
Please read it. It will enlighten the album for you.
When the instruments kick in, we are bathed with a wash of doomy frequencies, and the voice, so confrontational alone, becomes lost – drowned in the swelling guitars, samples and slaveship monotony of the drums. Tinkling phrases creep in and out of the soundscape, adding a dismal depth to the dirge.
It’s only when Berdan screams, as though awe-inspired by the naivety, “The bug stretches its neck up towards my face like my face was the fucking sun!” that anything approaching a conventional riff comes crashing in.
And crash is does. Glacially paced and awesome in its weight, it sounds like a collapsing iceberg. Immense. The instrumentation of the track is astonishing. Ben Greenberg’s production and guitars, especially, deserve a mention; he has created a monster.
The fourth movement begins quietly for a moment until Berdan cues a blast beat crescendo with “My throat is raw…” and we are beaten soundly and mercilessly around the skull with beats and screams until “I am filth, I am failure… carve it into my flesh so that I – ”
The mid-sentence hang of the ending adds an unsettling level of desperation to what is a side-long epic paean to insecurity, paranoia, misery and anguish.
It’s incredible and brings a level of progressive integrity to Uniform that really deepens, expands and enriches their grinding noise and industrial filth.
Side two kicks off in style with This Is Not A Prayer. This is exactly what you came for -Uniform as you know and love them. Grinding, unrelenting and heavy as fuck. Abusive and majestic. It’s been available online early, so you may have heard it already, but again – its situation, sandwiched between American Standard and Clemency, changes it and makes it mean more.
Clemency may well be my favourite track of the album. Rarely has such disdain been commercially available for us to revel in. The fury of waste; of a life lived in isolation. Begging for (and hoping for) forgiveness from the flies and birds inside and outside his window, Berdan is claustrophobic, powerless and completely frustrated.
It is emotionally difficult to listen to, which makes it even more special. It’s personal. It couldn’t be more so. It punches and pulls out your insides, just like it has done previously to Michael Berdan. The lyrics and the delivery are so powerful, you feel like you’re going through all this with him. It’s really, deeply, moving.
Thundering toms herald the final track Permanent Embrace. This has been available with a truly disturbing video for a month or so online and I urge you to check it out if you haven’t done so. The visuals are as ace as the rapturous Armageddon of the song itself.
If the end of days was somehow captured and released as a bingeable TV series for a future generation, Permanent Embrace would be the theme song. Its final line sums up the heart of the entire album’s tone: “And you found my love appalling.”
Is there a sadder sentiment than that?
As ever with Sacred Bones records, the presentation is beautiful. The artwork is suitably dismal and the graphic design is subtle and unobtrusive. God, I love this label. Entirely eclectic in artistry but (ahem) uniform in their identity. They pull off the impossible by uniting the oddities of the musical spectrum. My luscious Coke Bottle Clear and Black Marble vinyl came straight from Sacred Bones. Don’t let the shipping costs from America put you off. It’s heavy, kissable and sounds amazing. Go and buy a copy. Steal it if you must – but this is one you have to OWN.
It feels intrusive and wrong to take so much pleasure in American Standard. It’s too intimate. It feels invasive and uncomfortable to enjoy it.
It’s awkward in its naked, confessional vulnerability. Its tone is upsetting, concerning and loathsome.
It’s also a bloody brilliant beacon, distantly twinkling in the darkest depths of despair, offering the tiniest glimmer of hope to those who are similarly struggling. But unlike the songs themselves, that beacon is not screaming, puking or raging; it is quietly whispering “You are not alone.”.
And that is why American Standard is important.
And that is why it is an indispensable masterpiece.