With every movement of American Standard, Uniform peels off a new layer and tells the story inside of the one that came before it. It’s Uniform’s most intimate work to date, tackling themes of self-destruction and with a particular focus on vocalist Michael Berdan‘s lifelong struggle with bulimia nervosa. His lyrics sink down into the core of the innermost self, the small human being crushed in the grip of sickness. His bandmates join him, applying majestic droning that becomes both mechanical and omniscient. As the rhythms continually pulverise, Uniform gives themselves over to the grinding gears of an uncaring universe.
The thematic content behind American Standard can be divided down the middle into two distinct sections. While the A-side of the record deals with an individual who exists in a purgatorial state of physical and psychic crisis, the B-side serves to address how a lifetime of dealing with an eating disorder has impacted those around him.
“Permanent Embrace,” available today, is the album’s final statement. Berdan tells, “It touches on a facet of the disease that I’m incredibly wary of facing. Built on a narrative foundation laid out by author and lyrical collaborator Maggie Siebert, the song revolves around the idea of a person holding a loved one as an emotional hostage. Seeing perverse beauty in a story about a car crash, the narrator relates the analogy of two automobiles twisted together to that of his last standing relationship. As he has broken down over time, so has the one who continues to stand by him. The object of his manipulative guilt trips remains locked in a hopeless situation, terrified of what he may do to himself if they were to finally leave.
The music reflects the psychic violence of the lyrics, as riffs and rhythms that wouldn’t feel out of place in the Unsane catalog careen into giant synth melodies before collapsing into itself. This is kind of our misguided interpretation of what Faith No More were doing on ‘Angel Dust’, and we hope that our tip of the hat to those masters of madness can hold a candle to their horrific splendor.”
For “Permanent Embrace,” Uniform teamed up with director Sean Stout on the single’s compelling visual. Stout tells, "Without sounding trite, when we first read Mike’s lyrics to the record our reaction was extremely visceral. They are brutally introspective and beautiful at times and we wanted to try visually to convey that range of emotion in a sequence of single images that unfold narratively and potentially shift their own meaning over time. Our concept was to intertwine images of an outer world-overgrown, rusting and moving on in its decay-with an inter-world that is largely going through the same process as a result, but is markedly separate as well. We never see one observe or interact with the other, yet they are the same and of the same world."
Watch the video for ‘Permanent Embrace’ here:
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Uniform wants to find what’s underneath. And what’s underneath the underneath. And what’s under that.
American Standard begins with a shock. A voice, a room, a face in a mirror. In the mirror stares a visage, doubled and staring back. Each line comes back to him: reflected and refracted in the unsympathetic glass. Forget for a moment that Berdan has been destroying his throat in Uniform for over a decade. Forget his highly stylised delivery on the band’s acclaimed collaborative work (alongside experimental doom titans The Body and Japanese heavy rock powerhouse Boris). Forget the entire tradition of abrasive vocals in aggressive music. Look for what’s underneath the songs, the form, and the style.
To help peel away this narrative of eating disorders, self-hatred, delusion, mania, and ultimate discovery, Berdan sought assistance from a towering pair of outsider literary figures. Alongside B.R. Yeager (author of the modern cult-classic Negative Space) and Maggie Siebert (the mind behind the contemporary body horror masterpiece Bonding), the three writers eviscerate the personal material to present a portrait of mental and physical illness as vividly terrifying as anything in the present-day canon. The result is an acute articulation of a state beyond simple agony, capturing the thrilling transcendence and deliverance that sickness can bring in the process.
American Standard is surely Uniform’s most thematically accomplished and musically self assured album to date. Sections spiral and explode. Motifs drift off into obscurity before reasserting themselves with new power. Genres collide and burst open, forming something idiosyncratic and new. There’s a grandeur, due in part to the addition of Interpol bassist Brad Truax alongside the percussive push and pull of returning drummer Michael Sharp and longtime touring drummer Michael Blume, marking his Uniform recorded debut here. However, this magnificence is most clearly attributable to the scale and power of guitarist and founder Ben Greenberg’s arrangements, matching ever elegantly to the intense lyrical subject matter.
Underneath it all, what remains is trust. A record of this range and depth, a piece of art so far out on a ledge, can only be attempted with an extreme and almost foolish amount of understanding between collaborators. American Standard stands firmly on the bedrock that Uniform’s two original members, Michael Berdan and Ben Greenberg, have been building on for over a decade.
In Greenberg’s words, “When we started this record, Berdan told me: ‘I trust you to come up with a solid foundation for this, however you envision this thing. I want you to realize it completely, because I believe in you.’ So I wanted to write something overwhelming and all-encompassing for Berdan to lead his narrative through… because I trust and believe in him.” For an album to defy simple genre exercises and become a work of art, the musicians behind it must push themselves so far beyond the frayed ends of an established comfort zone that they might never return. Without a shred of doubt, American Standard is a work of art, agonising in its honesty and relentless in its pursuit of sonic transcendence. It is hideous. It is beautiful. It is necessary.
Press Photo By Joshua Zucker-Pluda & Sean Stout
Pictured: Founding Members Ben Greenberg (Guitar), Michael Berdan (Vocals)
Not Pictured: Mike Sharp (Drums), Brad Truax (Bass), Michael Blume (Drums)
Aural Aggravation 