Band:	Uniform
Album:	American Standard
Style:	Noise rock, Industrial metal
Release date:	August 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. American Standard
02. This Is Not A Prayer
03. Clemency
04. Permanent Embrace

Uniform take a note from the Godspeed You! Black Emperor book.

Before I explain what that means, there may be quite a few of you that don't have a clue who Uniform are, since most of the time they were reviewed it was as part of a collaboration, and both times the other bands was one with a lot more metal cred than Uniform. See, Uniform aren't really a metal band. They're a noise rock / industrial rock / hardcore punk band that often got heavy enough that you could call them "industrial metal". Boris and The Body, by comparison, even if they have quite a lot of their sound sitting outside the metal borders, are still unquestionably metal bands, with Metal-Archives profiles and all that. Even when I reviewed a solo album of theirs, I made note that this was "their most metal album yet", but it still wasn't a metal album.

Even so, I don't think there's any question as to why Uniform are here. Collaborations with metal bands aside, heavy metal-adjacent music aside, Shame benefitted from having a live drummer that was more focused on the punk part, and more emphasis on the guitars. It was still, as a whole, closer to being called a punk album than a metal one. American Standard also straddles that line without a clear passing of the border, but it makes a grandiose statement out of being very ambitious about switching things up. Here's where my teaser comes in to explain things, but it's worth pointing out that American Standard is the kind of album that is so overshadowed by one particular track. In this case, the self-titled opener takes up more than half of the runtime of the album. So it makes it impossible to talk about the album without dividing it into "that one track" and "the other tracks".

"American Standard", the track, is a monolithic track at over 20 minutes. It's also, besides its length, the least Uniform-y of the tracks here. It takes the angry downtrodden energy that they're known for, starting the track with only screaming, vocalist Michael Berdan screaming "A part of me, but it can't be me", diving headfirst into the album's themes of disorders and self-hatred. But then that gets twisted into something that feels more akin to Godspeed You! Black Emperor's serenity, an almost hypnotic pulse sustaining that monolithic sense towards something that feels weirdly cathartic for how shocking the declaration of angst that set it into motion was.

The rest of the tracks aren't slouches either, even if they don't really match the grandiosity that preceded them, and I wonder if the album would've worked better with its two sides reversed. For what they're concerned, they feel like even meatier versions of the sound that Uniform has been dabbling in, with some of that meatiness comes from the addition of a new member, bassist Brad Truax of Interpol, adding the same girth to the sound that the addition of drummer Mike Sharp did to Shame, though American Standard has double percussive credits, as longtime touring drummer Michael Blume also contributes to recording this time around. Though that doesn't mean that they're just retreading old sounds, the sludge on "Clemency" and the black metal on "Permanent Embrace" would disagree.

In sound and scope, this is definitely Uniform at their most maximalist. And that's even with American Standard being under 40 minutes. That's how huge the impact is.