Uniform - The Long Walk

Releasing their new album fresh off their tour in support of Deafheaven, Uniform seemed intent on bolstering their sound and making the boldest possible statement they could make. They had released a collaboration with The Body only a few months ago, which I found to be as half-baked as most of The Body’s collaborative albums. But on The Long Walk (ironically only 38 minutes), Uniform bring at least a more condensed and potent elixir of harsh, experimental, modern industrial metal, overlaid by Michael Berdan’s nasty, sardonic shouts.The album is certainly relentless and aggressive, and it captures a sense of being berated alone in a desolate cavern with incredible violence somehow too far away for any savior to hear. The album has moments of notable edge, like the increased heaviness the double-bass drumming provides the distorted industrial assault of the song “Found”, or the crunchy guitar-driven doom of “Alone in the Dark”. Nevertheless, most of the album blends together in a washed out haze, no thanks to the stifling production of the instrumentals, especially the guitar. Ordinarily the source of metallic distortion, the guitars take a meandering melodic back seat to the vocals and the cranking of the bass to compensate, and when the guitars are given their chance to take charge of a song, they sound like they’re being recorded from behind a closed door to given them some sort of lazy “spacy” effect that seems shoehorned into the album. It certainly doesn’t help their riff game out (which isn’t much to write home about on this album), muffling any possibility for the guitar to make the accents it needs to in order to sustain a strong melody. The song “Headless Eyes” is a great example of this. It’s when the band take the sounds to their most extreme and aggressive that this album does its best, and its when the instrumentals get mixed too “atmospherically” that this album is held back.