Feeling aggro? Tired of the same old stupid bullshit? “Dispatches From The Gutter” might be a song that you play loudly and that might make you feel better. Listen below.
Uniform’s “Dispatches from the Gutter” comes with a momentous video from filmmaker and director Jacqueline Castel. “The video was approached as a documented mass sigil informed by the historical and philosophical concept of self-immolation, performed under the lunar eclipse of Independence Day,” Castel explains. “Participants were asked to bring personal offerings to burn, and were given a directive to write down their intentions for the future, which were attached with accelerants to an effigy that was later cremated. It was a symbolic act of releasing what we wish to abandon, and an invocation of what we wish to rebuild.”
Uniform’s vocalist Michael Berdan reveals, “Aside from being a dear friend, Jacqueline has been a favorite director of all of ours for a very long time. Her stark aesthetic and eye for detail is without parallel. No one could have been better suited to create a visual representation of this song. Dispatches from the Gutter takes equal inspiration from Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke. It is about the fine line that many of us live on between times of relative stability and utter chaos, and what life is like once that fragile threshold is breached.”
What if the antihero in your favorite film or book had no chance to repent, reconcile, or redeem himself? There’s no victim to rescue. There’s no evil to thwart. There’s no tyranny to turnover. Instead of saving the day against his better judgment, he just walks a Sisyphean circle of existential malaise doomed to repeat yesterday’s vices without the promise of a better tomorrow. Rather than tell this story on the screen or on the page, Uniform tell it on their fourth full-length album, Shame. The trio – Berdan, Ben Greenberg (guitar, production), and Mike Sharp (drums) – strain struggle through an industrialized mill of grating guitars, warped electronics, war-torn percussion, and demonically catchy vocalizations.
Born in 2013, Uniform bulldozed a path to the forefront of underground music. Following their acclaimed works Perfect World (2015) and Wake in Fright (2017), the group’s third offering, The Long Walk (2018), represented a critical high watermark. In addition to touring with the likes of Deafheaven and Boris, they joined forces with The Body for a pair of collaborative albums – Mental Wounds Not Healing (2018) and Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back (2019) – as well as the live release, Live at the End of the World (2020). When it came time to pen Shame, Berdan made a conscious decision to include lyrics, marking a first.
Shame marks the debut of Sharp on drums whose presence grinds down their metallic industrial edge with a live percussive maelstrom. This time around, they’ve joined forces with Randall Dunn (Marissa Nadler, Sun O))), Earth) to perfect their powerful hybrid of digital and analog, electronic and acoustic, synthetic and actual that has become Uniform’s hallmark. Shame is out September 11 on Sacred Bones. For more info and to pre-order go here. Keep up with the latest Uniform updates on Instagram here.
