ALBUM REVIEW: The Walk – Uniform
New York duo UNIFORM have returned, this time with the inclusion of third member Greg Fox on drums, to create their latest album The Walk. This is an album that takes the concept of Stephen King’s book of the same name, The Walk, where one hundred boys are forced to walk at a constant pace from Maine to the Canadian border. While one boy wins, gaining all of his desires, the other ninety-nine boys meet a terrible fate. This is not necessarily a concept album, but one that takes the allegory of King’s novel and infuses it with personal issues with organised religion and corporate culture.
Title track The Walk is a thickly distorted, mountain of sound. It’s industrial to the very extremes. Heavy, barely audible in places, the lines between noise and music are blurred to create an unsettling blend. It’s a track with the very energy of DEATHFROMABOVE1979 and DRUNKDRIVER, while pushing for a much more punk attitude. With the addition of drums, it definitely adds another dynamic and authenticity that really compliments this album. Inhuman Condition continues with an even lower growl on the bass, a constant churning under the cries of vocalist Michael Berdan. To take a broad view of this album’s vocal performance, one must be prepared for something close to APHEX TWIN’s Come To Daddy; the feel to this kind of haunting, screeching, screaming. It’s like a literal storm from hell, a parallel for our industrial cage, the prison we have forced ourselves to conform to.
Found has a little more bite in its tempo, with all the messy distortion and fuzz of this one take recording. You won’t find any dynamic melodic changes throughout this album, it’s for sure a more thematic piece as a collective. We should also mention this album was recorded completely in a few days, with Ben Greenberg preferring a one take recording for the instrumentals. Coming from a mainstream rock and metal background, it’s hard to process these days, as often our pallet is accustomed to the polish of modern recording. This has the same quality as your phone as you attempt to capture a video of at a gig wildly louder than your little microphone can handle. It’s again metaphorical, and intentionally hard to listen to. That sound of music compressed down so much, that headache inducing, irritating crackle and buzz. Everything seems deliberate, a reflection of what an uncomfortable reality we’re living in.
Transubstantiation pushes more on that crashing drums, growling bass and unusual, corrupted synth sound. Lyrically, all of these tracks are hard to hear, but are well worth straining your ears to hear. The only moment of pause comes on this track. A beating drum, slowly enveloped by that static synth sound. As guitars rise and engulf what was the beat, that feeling panic and unease is perfectly what UNIFORM are trying to make the listener appreciate. Alone In The Dark takes a more punk sensibility in terms of it’s guitar sound here, making more of a heavy bounce than any track before. It’s potentially the only track that you might feel like the band are connection with you, on a musical level, rather than trying to compress your very soul. You feel like you personally are the one the track is talking about, alone in the dark.
Crunching in next, we have Headless Eyes, that sprinkes in a moment of ambient synth over a growling bass and drum duo. It’s a more contained structure than previous songs, more chanting, and a thunderous, broken synth sound in the breakdown. If you imagine the society this album is critiquing, both the one of Steven King‘s novel, and the one we live in, it’s a fantastic commentary on the organisations that steer our whole culture. The religions, the corporations, all the power and yet there is no figure head. We are being controlled by all, and yet none, watched by everyone, and yet no one. Another uncomfortable break down of a song, Anointing Of The Sick, really pushes that heavy notion of contradiction of religion and society as a whole. Much akin in sound to the rest of the album, the guitar solo, notably the only real solo we’ve come across thus far, is another layer of discomfort and unease. It fits thematically, but constant bends and changes leaves it feeling ever more crazed and removed from the track, with in itself is an expression of loss and disillusion.
Be sure to watch out for the ending of this one- no abrupt new start of the final song here, but a moment of natural sound, almost like the collection of room tone. While we won’t go into the technicalities of sound production, it’s essentially a technique used to adjust a listener’s ears to a constant tone of sound in a place. This may be unintentional, but the small inclusion of ambient sounds here might well be a subtle nod to all the things we miss in the day to day, and only notice once the great wave of sound on the record has subsided. On a grander scale, that should hopefully apply to the listeners in their morale and cultural activities.
Ringing notes buzz out of the guitars to herald in the finale of the album, Peaceable Kingdom. Interjected with single, striking drum beats, and the occasional tapping run on the high hat, it feels like the end of the race, the struggling steps into a futile and cruel future, or to no future at all. The finale push, a frenzied, frantic array of drums and erratic strumming truly emphasised the panicking end of a monstrous act, the race to win everything or lose everything. Coupled with the entire album’s emotionally charged aggression behind you, the totality of The Walk really weights hard on you emotionally.
This is by no means an easy album to digest, The Walk has to be appreciated by fans of UNIFORM, and of the inspiration behind the music. The most distorted, unconventional industrial punk sound you could imagine, coupled with real complexities of modernity, and great, uncomfortable symbolism throughout in both the music and the lyrics, makes this the most unusually successful albums of the year so far.
Rating: 8/10
The Walk is out now via Sacred Bones Records.
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