ALBUM REVIEW: American Standard – Uniform

August 22, 2024 Ellis Heasley

The following words describe an album that contains graphic themes of eating disorders. Reader and listener discretion is advised.

Harrowing, visceral, devastating – words like these can be overused when writing about extreme music, or at least they certainly start to feel that way when presented with something as truly harrowing, as truly visceral, and as completely and utterly devastating as American Standard by UNIFORM. The fifth full-length from the acclaimed and ever-evolving New York industrial outfit is perhaps their most ambitious yet – no mean feat for a band who have collaborated with acts as innovative and boundary-phobic as BORIS and THE BODY – its uncompromising musical vision a worthy and necessary match to the unflinching vulnerability of vocalist Michael Berdan.

To begin, as the record does, with Berdan himself, American Standard is a stark and confronting reckoning with the frontman’s decades-long experiences of bulimia nervosa, the physical and psychological consequences of that, and indeed the effect it has had on those closest to him. It feels almost intrusive at points, especially right at the start of the record as the title track opens with Berdan’s anguished screams – unaccompanied save for a reflection that spits his words right back at him – as though the listener has walked in on something they’re not meant to see. UNIFORM have always been good at causing discomfort, and their music has always been a source of catharsis and exorcism for Berdan, but never quite like this.

With the themes and narrative communicated exclusively via Berdan’s throat-shredding shrieks and shouts, and contorted further still by the input of writers B.R. Yeager and Maggie Siebert, American Standard is often more felt than it is fully understood. A pit in the stomach, a cold sweat… when the music subsides in the aforementioned title track for Berdan to croak “My throat is raw”, or as he barks “This. Is. Not. A. Prayer” over and over in the album’s lead single of the same name, the listener doesn’t necessarily need to know the whole story or to have read the companion essay published in The Quietus to get a sense of the pain and despair and even outright mania that lies behind it.

While Berdan naturally commands a lot of the attention, the music is far from an afterthought. To bring it up yet again, the title track really is the album’s masterpiece, a 21-minute epic that accounts for over half the total runtime and spends most of it centred on a mesmeric doomy drone that eventually gives way to an eruption of blast beats and melody to carry it over the threshold. These final five minutes or so are perhaps the most striking on the record, almost hopeful were it not for Berdan’s agonised screams recounting an experience in which he dropped his infant brother as a child (“I don’t remember if I meant it”).

Even beyond the expanse of its first track, American Standard is one of those records that is best experienced in full, the vision of co-founder and guitarist Ben Greenberg expertly realised with the help of two drummers – longtime touring member Michael Blume and the returning Michael Sharp – plus bassist Brad Truax of INTERPOL. The aforementioned This Is Not A Prayer proves similarly hypnotic and immersive, this one a relentless rhythmic pummelling centred around the cacophonous interplay of Blume and Sharp. The same is true of Clemency which follows, albeit with Greenberg’s twisted metallic riffing in the driving seat, while final track Permanent Embrace reaches for a little more brevity as it bounces between brutish noise rock and atmospheric synths and blast beats to bring the record to a desperate and maniacal close.

The range alone is impressive enough, but even more so is the way in which the band manage to melt it all down into a cohesive and coagulated whole — neither an incomprehensible mishmash of genres nor something that can be easily confined to just one or two, but instead its own unique entity: living, breathing, breathtaking and repulsive all at once. Albums like American Standard don’t come around often, and as long as you feel safely able to do so you should be sure to give it your time and attention.

Rating: 8/10