Band:	Uniform
Album:	Shame
Style:	Noise rock, Industrial metal
Release date:	September 11, 2020
A review by:	RaduP

01. Delco
02. The Shadow Of God's Hand
03. Life In Remission
04. Shame
05. All We've Ever Wanted
06. Dispatches From The Gutter
07. This Won't End Well
08. I Am The Cancer

Industrial/noise rock outfit Uniform unleash their most metal album yet, Shame, so you have no more excuses not to get into them.

Though you still won't see them featured on Metal-Archives anytime soon, you could say the same about a whole lot of metal bands. That's no excuse to dismiss them. Especially no excuse to dismiss Uniform, whose previous body of work and their two collabs with the equally frightening and noisy The Body were enough for us to proceed with their addition to our website. And with an interview. But Shame only further solidifies that decision. And it's not just the drums. But it's also the drums.

Now that I mentioned the drums, I might as well get to them. The most obvious change from previous records is the addition of Mike Sharp on drums, whereas previous Uniform album had either programmed drums, or later drummer Greg Fox of Liturgy and Ex Eye fame. Both of them amazing drummers, but Mike (Sharp, not Berdan) feels more fit for the hardcore part of their sound. So Mike is joining the other aforementioned Mike who does vocals and some electronics, and Ben Greenberg who does pretty much everything else. Including guitars.

And as far as guitars and bass guitars go, this album certainly feels their presence a lot more, as in having clear discernable riffs. A lot of them quite thrashy actually, but I suppose that comes with the hardcore influence. The blend of punk, industrial and noise seems to add more weight on the former than the latter two this time around, but it's not like we don't get crushing industrial noise in songs like "This Won't End Well". The desperate punk vocals of Berdan have always been a staple of Uniform and have actually graced recent Lingua Ignota and Couch Slut records as well, and they're just as effective here. Except that this time around the concept of the album is a bit changed.

In Mike's own words (Berdan, not Sharp): "I was reading a lot of hardboiled fiction and American Southern gothic stuff in tandem with writing this record, which is semi autobiographical. The self loathing introspection and agonizingly flawed nature of the main characters of these books spoke to me and directly informed the way I wanted to frame my story. I was attempting to pull more from Raymond Chandler and Flannery O'Connor than, say... Ray Cappo and Ian MacKaye. In some ways, I wanted this to be thematically the inverse of many hardcore records. Hardcore has a tendency to wag fingers at society at large, without taking any kind of inventory on how they perpetuate the problems they are trying to address. I wanted this record to focus on the source of the poison that feeds into the rest of the world, which so often starts with the self."

Yes, I filled an entire paragraph of my review with an answer from an interview I did. What are you gonna do about it? Shame, while still being as loud and noisy as Uniform have always been, also finds them at their grooviest and most emotionally messy.