Album review: Uniform – American Standard

The first minute and 52 seconds of Uniform’s fifth album is little more than unaccompanied screams. It’s a hell of an introduction to a title-track that spans over 21 minutes and which – like the three songs that follow it – deal unflinchingly with physical trauma, namely vocalist Michael Berdan’s lifelong struggle with bulimia.

It’s not, in fact, an exaggeration to say that there are moments on this album that almost replicate the visceral intensity of vomiting. Partly that’s due to Michael’s guttural growls, a voice that rattles and chokes on itself as it exits his mouth. Around it, though, is a brutally cacophonous swirl of sound that, especially on the title-track, is harrowing and – oddly, paradoxically, confusingly – comforting. As the song progresses, it consumes you more and more, swallowing you until, ironically, you’re trapped inside its pulsating, grotesque form until it fades and you’re finally released from its darkness.

If you thought there might be a reprieve after that, you’re sorely mistaken. Combined, the next three songs run a couple minutes shorter than the first, but they don’t let up at all. This Is Not A Prayer is a doom-laden blast of snarled and frenzied industrial metal that buzzes incessantly and ferociously until it explodes in a violent barrage of discordant noise, and while the atmospheric beginning of Clemency does live up to its name, it soon morphs into a typically unforgiving monolithic racket.

Then there’s closing track Permanent Embrace, a collage of disturbing screams, drums and guitars layered over each other and which mixes an almost religious (or anti-religious) fervour with some hyperactive industrial noise terror. All in all, it makes for a wonderfully disturbing listen that should leave you frazzled, exhausted and breathless.

Thanks to creative input from fantasy/horror authors BR Yeager and Maggie Siebert, American Standard truly draws you into the depths of human despair, fragility and suffering. But it also fights through the dark trauma at its heart to serve as important inspiration for confronting your demons, whatever they may be.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: Ministry, HEALTH, Swans

American Standard is released on August 23 via Sacred Bones