Uniform - Wake in Fright

Angry Metal Guy

“May you dream of the devil and wake in fright.” This old curse serves as the inspiration for the novel and later film adaptation Wake in Fright, a harrowing descent into madness that tells the tale of an English school teacher in a remote Australian town who wrestles with conformity, misery and the innate self-destruction that clings to man like a shadow. It’s not clear if New York duo Uniform took inspiration from the saying or the book/film for their sophomore album Wake in Fright, but considering that the music presented here speaks of isolation, misanthropy, and post-societal violence, it’s undeniable that they bathe in similar waters. This begs the question: Can Wake in Fright (the album) with its blend of industrial, thrash and noise be as effective in conveying the cloying horror and desolation of its namesake or is it no more than a pallid bugbear?

Uniform have certainly chosen the right style to articulate their pessimism. Clanging metal-on-metal, palm-muted riffs and unrelenting drum beats are ample tools to fashion a machine of apocalyptic torment. Plenty of metal bands have flirted with industrial influences in the past, from Killing Joke’s influential “Millennium” through to Nailbomb, Fear Factory, and Ministry, but in these cases the music is typically carried by a tight and catchy rhythm section hewn from granite. Not here. Divest yourself of any hopes for a sonically salubrious experience with Wake in Fright because Uniform offers none. Pleasing melodies and lilting tunes are given no quarter and in their place lurks a throbbing, atonal cacophony.

Wake in Fright by Uniform

“Habit” is a squealing, pulsing horror show, using reams of cold feedback, anemic percussion and vocalist Mike Berden’s bitter, hardcore-tinged shouts to create the musical equivalent of hallucinogenic sleep-deprivation. “The Lost” is subtly textured with many electronic blurbs, beats and a rusty lead that drunkenly weaves between foreground and background while Berden continually and monotonously disgorges a diatribe that is equal parts irritating and hypnotic. “The Killing of America” opens with a positively filthy riff that buzzes like a swarm of vituperative wasps and a dogged percussion but it’s the unexpected, manic solo towards the end that shows that the band is capable of surprising you when you least expect it. The auditory output presented by Uniform on Wake in Fright is complete deconstruction, the systematic reduction of musical elements into their base forms, lashed together out of sequence and designed to paint a grim landscape flensed clean of warmth and salvation.

It’s a pity then that the album is painfully hobbled by a very poor production. No one expects the Spanish Inquisition a delicately hand-crafted audiophile recording from industrial/noise-influenced music, especially when abject terror is the soup of the day, but when an album is mixed and mastered in such a way as to leave the music sounding insipidly flat you have a problem on your hands. Riff after riff, beat after beat, too much is lost in an indistinct malaise shorn of dynamics and detail. What’s worse is this diffusion led to portions of songs disengaging me entirely, letting my mind drift with nary any recollection of what had transpired. I should be sitting bolt upright by the end of these tracks, short of breath, nostrils flared and my pupils reduced to pinpricks in anticipation of some calamity ready to befall me, not struggling to stifle a yawn. Anaal Nathrakh have been pilloried for their ear-bleeding mixes but it doesn’t prevent them from conveying their brand of incendiary animosity.

Wake in Fright (the film) succeeds in its ability to unnerve and unsettle, delving deep under the skin and leaving you in a cold sweat at its conclusion. Uniform, while capable of presenting a suffocating vision of violence and despair with Wake in Fright, is all too often undermined by a muted production that not only robs the music of engagement and immediacy but actively weakens the hellish darkness they are so eager to unleash into the world.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 160 kbps mp3
Label: Sacred Bones Records
Websites: unifuckingform.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/uniformnewyork
Releases Worldwide: January 20th, 2017

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The Quietus

‘The Light at the End (Effect)’, the final track on Wake In Fright – the third record by New York duo Uniform – opens with a sample from Philip Ridley’s 1990 film The Reflecting Skin. ‘It's all so horrible you know, the nightmare of childhood,’ an abusive mother intones. ‘And it only gets worse. One day you'll wake up, and you'll be past it.’

That film might have been about pubescent horror in the Midwest, but for all intents and purposes Wake In Fright is the sound of a band snapping unhappily into life. It’s been widely noted that the album was released on Trump’s inauguration day, and while Uniform’s acerbic, end-of-times blend of electronic noise, hardcore and industrial rock is an apt soundtrack to the systematic dismantling of decency – there’s a song on here called ‘The Killing of America’ after all – it’s merely an (un)happy coincidence. Still, it’s hard to dismiss the prescience of it all.

That’s not to say vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/producer Ben Greenberg (the former of such rollicking grime merchants as Drunkdriver and Believer/Law, the latter late of noise punk darlings The Men) aren’t angry. Wake in Fright is an extremely – even joyfully – bleak record, dealing with the lobotomised gloom of addiction, caustic ennui and existential grind. It’s concerned, says Berdan in the record’s PR, with “psychic transition… This is what happens when old ways of thinking become exhausted and old ways of coping prove ineffective. Something must change or it will break.” Concept and craft align in unbroken symbiosis.

At its core, Wake in Fright isn’t much removed from the duo’s previous records. Blown-red synthetic kicks and cracks pummel away, while Greenberg’s guitars scrape and pound with a grindcore intensity, rudimentary bass droning underneath and Berdan gargling unintelligibly over the top. His snotty vocal is Uniform’s secret weapon; while Greenberg’s programming is dense and surprisingly nuanced, Berdan’s corrosive howling – part hardcore sage, part swivel-eyed harsh noise ranter – is what really ups the bile to corrosive levels.

But where Perfect World (released on Altar in 2015) revelled in ascetic construction, Wake in Fright, as with its Sacred Bones precursor Ghosthouse, is an expanded proposition. Apart from the incrementally higher-fi sonics, the musical palate here is broader, encompassing more choppy Big Black-isms, thrash solos and, in the form of album standout ‘The Lost’, a smattering of honest-to-god melody. The percussion comprises samples of gunshots and explosions drawn from foley packs and action films; nihilistic found sounds for the Bush generation.

Still, oppressive miserablism is the dish of the day and from its first moments – a split-second of feedback tipping into a mechanically overdriven groove and a scream – Wake in Fright wraps a hand round the throat and tightens its grip. The effect is cumulative. ‘Habit’ is as blunt as its title, a martial beat underpinning Berdan’s strained paeans to compulsive dependency, only released by Greenberg’s brief deployment of some genuinely effusive riffing.

The aforementioned ‘The Killing of America’ – taking aim at gun crime, replete with a video that lists and maps, one by one, shootings across the US in 2016 – opens with a discordant chug, the drum machine building momentum until the plateau is upended by a splattery, whinnying metal solo, the kicks tumbling into a smoosh of white noise and a voice intoning Bukowski’s ‘The Genius of the Crowd’: ‘There’s enough genius in their hatred to kill you, to kill anybody.’ It’s thrilling stuff. So it continues: from the unrelenting grind of ‘Bootlicker’ to the exhausted spoken-word drone of ‘The Light at the End (Effect)’, via the relative restraint of ‘Night of Fear’ a claustrophobic slow-burner and the track in which the military samples are most easily identified.

Standing alone, aesthetically, is ‘The Lost’. It’s by far Uniform’s best track to date; a fat-free sub-five minutes of NIN-indebted synth pulse, shuddering distortion and anthemic choruses (all despite Berdan’s best efforts, and that’s a compliment). That it’s followed by ‘The Light At The End (Cause)’ – the album’s most punishing track, segueing from a Converge-esque onslaught into tinny, static feedback – simply serves to emphasise this. A whole record of this would be a breathless proposition. As it stands, Wake In Fright is a misanthropic social/personal/political blank cheque as bleak in outlook as it is righteously harrowing in sound. It’s 2017, and life’s a chasm. Uniform are staring right in.

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Pitchfork 80

Uniform—the duo consisting of vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/programmer Ben Greenberg—started out obsessed with trying to make industrial order from punk chaos. Their debut, Perfect World, sounds like sinister master planning in its title alone; in some alternate universe even worse than ours, its cover would be a chic totalitarian symbol. In a short time, they’ve gotten angrier and let the chaos they tried to control run free. Perfect laid out what a gray dystopia would look like; their sophomore album Wake in Fright is Uniform fighting back, leaning more heavily towards their hardcore and metal heritage.

Opener “Tabloid” sounds like Big Black embracing thrash, capturing the precision of a machine coming into conflict with the immeasurable energy of bodies flying through a crowd. Their last record featured a collaboration with Coil’s Drew McDowall; this song shows their ideal touring partners may be Power Trip. Greenberg’s abrasive industrial tone sounds elastic when applied to honest-to-evilness metal riffs, finding a flexibility in rigidity. Even so, he beats you down with select riffs instead of throwing them all out. Such is the case with “Bootlicker,” where thrash gets locked into a snarling loop; if Tom Araya was on vocals, it would be the best Slayer song in years. (Greenberg also nods to Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman’s reckless, borderline free soloing at the end of “The Killing of America.”)

While it seems simplistic to equate “faster material” with “more urgent,” that’s Fright’s key strength. Greenberg has never sound angrier or more excited (and often, both), and the same can be said for Berdan. “The Light At the End (Cause)” is their most relentless track yet, the moment where both Greenberg and Berdan let a loss of control be their guiding force. It could be replicated by a proficient drummer, but it would sacrifice its jackhammer oppressiveness.

They haven’t abandoned their slower industrial tracks, but flipping the ratio between those and hardcore works in their favor. “Night of Fear” is most like Perfect, aided by the tension between the militaristic drums and Berdan’s shouted urges to deprogram. “The Lost” is their first attempt at warping the poppier side of their industrial influences; it is their most danceable song, loosely speaking, a dimmer take on Cold Cave’s goth-via-hardcore. In terms of club potential, it leans closer to Prurient’s “You Show Great Spirit,” more of an unforgiving blacklight shone on after-hours sleaze. It is also liberating because it allows a light of joy in, however small, which is more radical than an onslaught of persistent negativity.

Uniform couldn’t have predicted the future when they were making Fright, even though Perfect was itself a world-building exercise, but this is the kind of record we need now more than ever. They’re not more vicious by circumstance; their own uncoupling just happens to better reflect our future. Perfect was more of a reinvention for Greenberg, then fresh out of the Men, then it was for Berdan, whose screams didn’t sound much different than they did in Drunkdriver. With Fright, both have found new sides to themselves: Greenberg tapped into his inner metal kid, but Berdan has taken the self-apocalyptic energy of his past and turned it into a weapon for redemption and moving forward, much like Negative Approach did in the ’80s. Salvation may seem to be out of reach at this point, but that’s no reason to claw towards to it; the exercise may be the only thing to keep us sane in the years coming up.

Drowned In Sound 70

On first listen this is a thrillingly visceral mix. Wake in Fright is the record people confused by Wolf Eyes’ assertions of being a 'trip metal' band have been waiting for, rekindling the nihilistic psychedelia at the heart of industrial and marrying it with unrelenting Converge-esque metallic hardcore. The Godflesh-gone-thrash drum programming doesn’t hurt either. Its 28 minutes fly by in punishing fashion, leaving listeners sprawling in the dirt by the time horror-sampling ‘The Light at the End (Effect)’ brings events to a close.

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Second or third time around it becomes clearer that Wake in Fright, for all its full-throttle savagery, is a slightly more multi-faceted beast than it initially seems. Uniform prove themselves here to be comfortable on both sides of the twenty-first century noise divide between the floor and the pit. Some moments here seem geared towards the dingy metal bar, whilst others seem to be catering towards a loud and antagonistic basement techno club. So, to refer back to the names I mentioned earlier, ‘The Lost’ is reminiscent of Cabaret Voltaire, whilst ‘The Killing of America’ is closer to Slayer.

This attempt to marry together two equally confrontational (in their own distinct ways) musical forms reaps real rewards, and undoubtedly makes Wake in Fright a more consistently provocative record than the duo’s debut. It’s apparent, however, that Uniform’s default setting is better considered in terms of aggression. Wake in Fright’s selling point is that – no matter how well it binds together varied musical strands – it is that rare contemporary record that convincingly portrays real hostility.

Greenberg’s own words sum the situation up best: 'We are surrounded by war and the whole world is burning and it doesn't seem like there are any appropriate reactions or responses left anymore. This music is our response to and our reflection of the overwhelming violence, chaos, hate, and destruction that confronts us and everyone else in the world every day of our lives.' Even if one may question whether Wake in Fright’s bludgeoning assault really does manage to be both reflective and reflexive in the way Greenberg outlines, few could deny that – in times like this – there’s a need for bands like Uniform. If you’re looking for a soundtrack for punching Nazis in 2017, you might have just found it.