Album Review: American Standard by Uniform

The music - a sawblading, industrial scrape that's equal parts Swans and 90s Sepultura - is endurance test enough, but then comes Michael Berdan's merciless self-analysis. He draws uncomfortable conclusions that might be exquisitely personal, but they linger and gnaw: suggestions that chivvy endlessly away at the listener in order to lay bare every weakness, every flaw, and every wretched, deceitful character trait you hope to keep hidden from the people around you American Standard is, paradoxically, perhaps the band's most straight-up listenable record while also their hardest to process thematically. As outlined in a recent essay for the Quietus, it focuses in large part on a life lived with bulimia nervosa.

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Photo by Joshua Zucker "American Standard," the title track from the new LP by NYC noiseniks Uniform, will likely dominate the attention garnered by the record. That's justified: the song is massive, at 21+ minutes, and it's massively unpleasant -- more on those qualities below. But listeners shouldn't neglect the rest of the release. The shorter songs that compose the remainder of American Standard are just as uncompromising, and they also foreground the band's gift for coupling a caustic, aggro sensibility with compelling melodic structures.

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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 ….

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On American Standard, the New York neo-industrial band’s shockingly great fifth LP, Berdan confronts a decades-long struggle with bulimia, a disease that is more pervasive in men than once assumed. Compulsive behavior is a tricky thing—the urge to control one’s environment, one’s body, one’s experience is primal for humans. And anyone who has done time in a 12-step meeting can tell you that self-loathing is a hell of a drug in itself. But Berdan and his longtime musical partner Ben Greenberg, along with bassist Brad Truax and drummers Mike Sharp and Michael Blume, avoid such vanity, their music obliterating the line between Skinny Puppy’s electronic psychosis and the sludge of Swans. .

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