Uniform - Ghosthouse

Pitchfork 72

Michael Berdan has a brawler’s voice, spittle-flecked and dissolute. Those nagging vocals seized center stage on Perfect World, the blistering 2015 debut LP from Uniform, Berdan’s duo with multi-instrumentalist Ben Greenberg. Theirs was a marriage made in industrial-punk Hades, draping righteous pique over a grind lashed together from guitar groan and staple-gun electronics. Over the course of six songs—capped by churning, spoken-word downer “Learning to Forget”—the NYC-based pair forged a bracing, singular sound as strong as its Bad Religion-esque logo, strong enough to sustain a cult career.

With Ghosthouse, Berdan and Greenberg demonstrate a healthy willingness to interrogate and even upend that sound. The duo’s core certainly remains in place: that punishing glower, that pounding thump, those declamations. But as the title track convulses, it is overwhelmed by a smear of effects, a mutation that might have sat in the background on their first album suddenly assuming center stage.

Crazed Sabbath cover “Symptom of the Universe” represents Ghosthouse’s most significant departure. Thundering pop-metal riffs cement the song’s melodic backbone, ultimately exploding into the kind of frenzied, epic soloing that fell out of mainstream favor a decade back; effects skitter and sizzle at the margins, while Berdan’s chants are yanked backwards through vocal filters. Rob Zombie and Mastodon may be the last touchstones you expect to encounter on a Uniform record, yet they apply here. This, after all, is what the EP format is truly for: to bravely dip a toe into the unknown, to strain a bit against the boundaries of what listeners have come to expect. Sophomore LP Wake In Fright arrives early next year; we know, now, to anticipate anything and everything.