Adult Swim Singles – 30th January 2020
Christopher Nosnbor
This one’s crashed in seemingly from nowhere, and because it’s Uniform, it crashes in hard. Promising ‘the first taste of a new song cycle that doubles down on the most immediate aspects of the band’s sound’, with shouter Michael Berdan drawing attention to the more dance-orientated sound.
And indeed, the groove is built around a steady, monotonous dance beat, but it’s a pounding industrial beat that’s reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails. The opening segment is sparse, with just drum and vocal and some rumbling extranea forging a claustrophobic tension before everything goes classic Uniform with a pulverizing blast of noise that packs all the abrasion, and again, it’s Broken era NIN that comes to mind as they meld devastating guitars to live drums hammering out mechanoid rhythms.
The guitar overdrives to the point of overload, and Berdan’s anguished holler channels the anger and anxiety of the song’s focus: “‘Awakening’ is about the daily frustrations of a complacent existence in late capitalism. Some might take it as a protest song. However, it’s to be implied that waking up with a deep seeded anger is something that happens every day. We know they are mad, but we don’t know if anything will ever change.”
If any band articulates the suffering that living in the present can create: the relentless sense of pounding your head against a wall, screaming into a void, unheard, in the face of endless idiocy and sheer brutality at the hands of a capitalism so hard that it’s beyond dehumanising. Compassion and care are out of the window as everyone is too busy climbing over everyone else just to survive, while the upper echelons crow and don’t even bother to pretend to cast down their crumbs as the pretence of any trickle-down is erased in the face of sheer greed. The power elites hold all of the power, and the rest of us are powerless to effect change.
And so many of the oppressed are oblivious to all of this, enabling the oppressors in supporting the Trumps and the Johnsons, feeding the instruments of their own oppression while failing to see the cycle they’re perpetuating, blind to the fact that ‘foreigners’ aren’t ‘stealing’ their jobs and sapping the welfare coffers, but propping up a fragile boom and bust economy by doing the minimum wage, zero-hours, per-delivery drudge jobs no-one else will take.
You wake up, burning with incendiary rage that these people, who’ve swallowed the propaganda wholesale wont; fucking wake up, and you veer wildly between wanting to kill ‘em all and killing yourself, but in the end you do neither because you’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed so you do nothing but work and hate yourself for it until you crash out to suffer nightmares and then rinse and repeat the next day and the next.
That sense of confinement, of futility, and endless fury, that is what Uniform distil into four minutes of pounding anger.
AA
Uniform US Live Dates (all w/ The Body):
March 01: Portland, OR – Doug Fir Lounge
March 02: Vancouver, BC – Biltmore Cabaret
March 03: Seattle, WA – Laser Dome at the Pacific Science Center
March 05: San Francisco, CA – Rickshaw Stop
March 06: Los Angeles, CA – Zebulon
March 07: Las Vegas, NV – Bunkhouse Saloon
March 08: Phoenix, AZ – The Rebel Lounge
March 10: San Antonio, TX – Paper Tiger
March 11: Dallas, TX – Three Links Deep Ellum
March 12: New Orleans – Gasa Gasa
March 13: Atlanta, GA – Food Court
March 14: Durham, NC – The Pinhook
March 15: Washington, DC – Black Cat
March 16: Philadelphia, PA – Boot & Saddle
March 18: Brooklyn, NY – Market Hotel
March 19: Somerville, MA – Once Ballroom
March 20: Providence, RI – Columbus Theatre
March 21: Montreal, QC – La Vitrola
March 22: Toronto, ON – The Garrison
March 24: Chicago, IL – Empty Bottle
March 25: Minneapolis, MN – Turf Club
June 05 – 07: Austin, TX – Oblivion Access
Aural Aggravation 