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Sep 29, 2020 Web Exclusive By Ian King

“You are what you’ve done/You are what’s been done to you,” Michael Berdan serratedly declares over and over at the start of “Delco,” the opening shot on Uniform’s Shame. Whichever one of those two statements has less appeal might reveal something about you, but neither thought is particularly comforting. Five seconds in, then, and Berdan and guitarist/producer Ben Greenberg have already hit their sweet spot.

Uniform thrive on discomfort; not the over-the-top kind found strewn along metal’s gorey fringes, but an existential dread more grounded in bleak and bare faces of reality. They build it up, stare it down, and dismantle it piece by piece. They feed their frayed anger with the questions that can keep you up at night. Shame is Uniform’s fourth album in roughly five years, and the range and muscle they’ve incrementally built up in their sound is bolstered here with the addition of drummer Mike Sharp.

There is no purism in Uniform’s approach, which is a liberating factor in their industrial aggro vision. The grist of Shame comes from somewhere between reading hard-boiled fiction and conducting hard self-examination, and its own conclusions are grim (“God will not love you forever” are the parting words of album-closer “I am the Cancer”), but the barbed mechanisms at work can transmute such thoughts as well. (www.unifuckingform.bandcamp.com)

Author rating: 8/10