'A part of me / But it can't be me.' This is the opening line to Uniform's latest offering, American Standard, and the pathos behind Michael Berdan's message is one that animates the four long tracks that make up this release. At the risk of reading too much into the lines, I am tempted to say that this disconnect between appendage and self – belonging to a larger body and yet stubbornly foreign to it – also describes the aesthetic of Uniform's unique blend of electronics and guttural screamo, thanks in large part to the twin minds behind the project: Berdan and instrumentalist Ben Greenberg. For the former, the album is a confession of sorts, meant to exhume years of living with bulimia and its endless cycle of binge and purge, actualized over American Standard in each of Berdan's vocal deliveries, which leave little room for filtered nuance or resolution.
Greenberg, on the other hand, was tasked with composing something that could accompany such raw emotion, without things falling into predictable patterns. The result is an album that builds in tension without ever releasing said tension into digestible nuggets of sonic interest. The opening track, the eponymous "American Standard," comes in at over 21 minutes and is less a narrative arc than an accumulation of moments of pent-up frustration. As such, in musical terms, there is a whole lot of attack with almost no decay, to borrow a metaphor from the synth world, a musical logic reinforced by a keen awareness of the language of electronics in the guise of noisy rock. In other words, American Standard is unapologetically non-teleological, hence the disavowal of prayer and the like, geared as those things are toward resolution, a move that is incredibly difficult to subvert in context of a production setting, where time is marked by what is "finished" as opposed to something open and festering. Short, repeated phrasing, like that on the riff-static opening to "Clemency," conjures the very themes it wishes to address without resorting to language or representation in order to do so. The linear march is like the compulsion that drives Berdan's sickness, and it is a question of form as much as content.
Fans of Uniform's brand of heavy rock, a la Swans or later Zeni Geva, are sure to find American Standard a clever continuation of the ongoing project. Others drawn to the heavier side of industrial electronics will find the incessant attack of Uniform's aesthetic a welcome addition to the genre.
