Uniform – American Standard (Sacred Bones Records) – Give it a couple of minutes to slowly unfold, to slowly pick you up and take you with it, that opening twenty one minute track is massive. That opening twenty one minute title track is a serious piece of intense art

 – “American Standard begins with a shock. Vocalist Michael Berdan stands alone, screaming, “A part of me, but it can’t be me. Oh God, it can’t.” It all starts with an admission. Beneath the harrowing screams, there’s the pain of bulimia nervosa. There’s the pain of a sickness that is as physical as it is psychological. This is a kind of emergence…”

– This is powerful, this is brooding, this is big, Uniform are from New York City, it would be easy to let them flow by in the river of a million bands demanding our collective time but this is an album and and a band that matter – “Through an industrialized mill of grating guitars, warped electronics, war-torn percussion and demonically catchy vocals, Uniform have bulldozed a path to the forefront of underground music. Michael Berdan (vocals, synths), Ben Greenberg (guitar, production), & Mike Sharp (drums) solidify their place as purveyors of industrial noise and champions of, and victors in, pushing boundaries” – There’s fifteen minutes of tense intensity before he takes a couple of moments to tell us his throat is raw before they go again with a few more colours added to the palette. To call it industrial is to do it a great disservice, industrial conjours up ideas of black-clad goths hitting bits of metal and getting all machine-like with their guitars and keyboards, this opening track is a massive painting way beyond any of those industrial global noise attacks, this is something to really sit up and take notice of. The whole forty off minutes and all four tracks are relentlessly powerful. It is that opening epic that makes this album a masterpiece though, actually no scratch that, the eight minutes of Clemency offer no hope of any, it might not be the longest album ever but you really don’t want any more than the forty minutes that give, this is hours of frontline storming grandeur and that silence at the end of the closing track Permanent Embrace really is needed while breath is caught. 

 American Standard came out back and the end of August, we’re doing that end of year catch tidy up thing here and yes there are only so many hours in not enuogh days and so many layers to peel back on this album, so much honesty, agony, self-hatred, reality, and art, the real art of noise, these are four intense paintings and thing like this is why we still bloody mindedly do this Organ thing after all this time, don’t let this album pass you by, we nearly did.  (sw)

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Uniform – Nightmare City – Hang on, stop the bus, there’s more, this makes American Standard even better, this is Nightmare City, an alternate, dissected instrumental version of American Standard. “A companion piece to American Standard, Nightmare City is essentially the same record devoid of the rock elements. By removing the presence of traditional instruments, the synths, lap steel, and pianos that sit beneath the surface of the proper album are allowed room to breathe and speak for themselves. The end result straddles the worlds of Basic Channel influenced dub, Tangerine Dream inspired soundscapes, and brutal death industrial”. This is beautiful, you really have to play American Standard first, you have to get to know it a little and then this will glow. Those same tunes, those same intense pieces, familiar yet beautifully difference, the whole experience, and it is an experience, the whole thing enhanced, the nighttime calm after the storm, this is glorious, gloriously moving. We’ll let the band explain it…

“Rarely can a record be taken at face value. Although the finished product stands as a culmination of cohesive sounds, the individual threads that weave songs together often provide necessary nuance and exposition all of their own. Each isolated stem might be part of a greater story, but the whole cannot stand as intended without a complex series of seemingly disparate elements.

Throughout our existence, Uniform has never particularly cared for genre exercises. We thrive in a constant state of reinvention, making whatever kind of music we feel like making at any given moment. Some records lean into electronic and industrial tropes, while others borrow heavily from punk, metal, and avant-garde rock. This freewheeling spirit of creative liberty is what keeps the band together. If Uniform were bent on following a template, we’d get bored. The second we get bored, we cease to exist.

The creation of the American Standard album has absorbed several years of our collective life. We started writing it in early 2022, tracked most of the instrumentals in the Spring of 2023, and didn’t finish editing the final product until the dead of Winter of 2024. In many ways, it stands as the most organic record that we’ve ever made. Given that the core of the band is two drums, bass, guitar, and vocals, those are the elements highlighted in the final mix. However, stripping those elements away reveals an entirely different collection of songs.

A companion piece to American Standard, Nightmare City is essentially the same record devoid of the rock elements. By removing the presence of traditional instruments, the synths, lap steel, and pianos that sit beneath the surface of the proper album are allowed room to breathe and speak for themselves. The end result straddles the worlds of Basic Channel influenced dub, Tangerine Dream inspired soundscapes, and brutal death industrial.

The bedrock of American Standard stands upon the Nightmare City. It’s not the happiest of all places, but understanding the landscape yields its own rewards. We hope you enjoy your stay”.

There’s always another great band waiting for you to find them….

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