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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.

With every movement of American Standard, Uniform peels off a new layer and tells

the story inside of the one that came before it. The lyrics sink down into the core of

the innermost self, the small human being crushed in the grip of sickness. To help

peel away this narrative of eating disorders, self-hatred, delusion, mania, and ultimate

discovery, Berdan sought assistance from a towering pair of outsider literary figures.

Alongside B.R. Yeager (author of the modern cult-classic Negative Space) and Maggie

Siebert (the mind behind the contemporary body horror masterpiece Bonding), the

three writers eviscerate the personal material to present a portrait of mental and

physical illness as vividly terrifying as anything in the present-day canon. The result is

an acute articulation of a state beyond simple agony, capturing the thrilling transcendence and deliverance that sickness can bring in the process.

American Standard is surely Uniform's most thematically accomplished and musically

self assured album to date. Sections spiral and explode. Motifs drift off into obscurity

before reasserting themselves with new power. Genres collide and burst open, forming something idiosyncratic and new. There's a grandeur, due in part to the addition

of Interpol bassist Brad Truax alongside the percussive push and pull of returning

drummer Michael Sharp and longtime touring drummer Michael Bloom, marking

his Uniform recorded debut here. However, this magnificence is most clearly attributable to the scale and power of guitarist and founder Ben Greenberg's arrangements,

matching ever elegantly to the intense lyrical subject matter.

Without a shred of doubt, American Standard is a work of art, agonizing in it's honesty

and relentless in it's pursuit of sonic transcendence. It is hideous. It is beautiful. It is

necessary