Wake in Fright

Uniform is two people. Michael Berdan sings; Ben Greenberg plays guitar, programs the machines and produces. They formed in New York in 2013, made Perfect World in 2015 with, by Greenberg’s account, one bass synth and one drum machine, and moved to Sacred Bones for the Ghosthouse EP in 2016. Wake in Fright, their second full-length, came out on 20 January 2017: eight songs, 37 minutes, and still no drummer.

The drums are where the record starts. Sacred Bones’ notes say the kick drums are bombs and the snares are gunshots, sampled from action films, Foley packs and field recordings. Greenberg told Time Out that each kick is several drum-machine kicks stacked with a couple of live kicks from his own sessions, then layered with explosions and gunfire. He wanted a bigger sound than the debut without making things complicated, and he plays through 1970s Peavey PA heads because Greg Ginn used them in early Black Flag. Both members said there was more metal in it than before, and the label pitches the guitar as owing as much to Slayer as to Big Black.

The songs are character studies. Berdan has described the record as being about “psychic transition”, about old ways of coping that stop working, and he took most of the titles from exploitation films and pulp horror novels. “Habit” is a chronic drinker who wants to stop and physically can’t; the same man comes back in “Bootlicker”, sober for a while, as the old feelings return. “The Light at the End (Cause)” follows a long-term user who doesn’t care who gets hurt, and it opens at blast-beat speed before collapsing into a slow dirge. Its counterpart, “The Light at the End (Effect)”, finds the same person remorseful and still dependent. It closes the album mostly in spoken word over drone, and it opens with a line of dialogue from Philip Ridley’s 1990 film The Reflecting Skin.

The rest stays close to home. “Tabloid”, the first single, is one bad thought spiralling into the next, and it starts with feedback before the drum machine and Berdan’s scream come in. “The Lost” is about his hometown, where many of the people he grew up with have been in and out of prison or are dead. “Night of Fear” is his own insomnia, the thoughts he has at 3am, and he tied the album’s title to the same sleeplessness, though it also belongs to Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film. The one openly political song is “The Killing of America”, about gun violence. It takes its name from a 1982 documentary, and its video plots every 2016 US mass shooting as a red dot, taking its cue from Isao Hashimoto’s nuclear-test piece 1945–1998. The album came out on Inauguration Day, which Berdan called a “one-hundred percent coincidence”.

Critics mostly agreed. Metacritic averaged 80 from ten reviews. Most singled out “The Lost” as the standout and the most melodic thing the duo had made, with early New Order as the usual comparison, and most heard Ministry as the obvious ancestor and Slayer in the riffs. They split on Berdan’s voice: The Quietus called his howl the band’s secret weapon, while Exclaim! noted that it sits at the back of the mix. Treble found it their most accessible set, No Ripcord found it a little overwrought, and Drowned in Sound doubted it was as reflective as Greenberg claimed.

What holds it together is the gap between the noise and the subjects. The percussion is built from the sounds of war, but the songs are about drinking, sleeplessness and a hometown that swallows people, written as inner monologues rather than slogans. That is why it outgrew the protest-record reading its release date invited, and why “The Lost”, the song critics found most human, became its centre. It is relentless by design and done in 37 minutes, which is the right length for something this hostile.