Following the terrorizing Wake in Fright and an equally hair-raising collaboration with the Body, Uniform push their sound even further with their third album for Sacred Bones.
This time, Ben Greenberg and Michael Berdan are joined by drummer Greg Fox, who adds much more of a visceral attack to Uniform’s already bracing music. While Wake in Fright utilized samples of gun shots and explosions in order to match the violent themes of the songs’ lyrics, the live drumming on The Long Walk sounds much rawer and more direct. It’s even darker and noisier than the group’s previous albums, sounding more like a recording of a basement punk show during the ’80s, then dug up from the vaults and remixed with modern equipment, only to make it sound…
…harsher and uglier. “Found” begins scuzzily enough, with Slayer-ish riffs and battered drums, but by the end it erupts into a shower of bullet-fired kicks, and has no choice but to collapse. The mutated grindcore blastbeats at the end of album finale “Peaceable Kingdom” are nearly as devastating. Other tracks have more of a sludgy, midtempo industrial metal groove, blasting out furious riffs spiked with fits of pummeling drums. While it’s nearly impossible to tell what Berdan is screaming about, the lyrics on The Long Walk are far more personal than the ones on Wake in Fright, which was a blatant reaction to the sociopolitical state of the world. This time out, Berdan deals with organized religion and his personal conflict of identifying as a Catholic but being repulsed by the bigotry, repression, and hateful acts committed in the name of religion. It isn’t quite clear if he comes to a resolution, or if that’s even possible. Regardless, The Long Walk is some of Uniform’s most challenging, disrupting work yet.