One totally reasonable reaction to damaged industrial music is to turn it off. No matter how impressively it might creep and writhe and explode, the sheer hostility and balefulness of the blown-out everything can be hard to take in heavy doses. New York duo Uniform, who happily tip their hat to Big Black, navigate that slippery slope via the work of producer/guitarist Ben Greenberg. On January’s Wake in Fright (Sacred Bones) he’s prone to relentlessly pulverizing a track into rubble (“The Light at the End (Cause)”), but he can just as easily finesse a twisted rock ’n’ roll lick from the noise (“Habit”) or build a track off a meaty power-chord riff that in another life could’ve been the foundation of a Dead Boys track (“The Killing of America”). And Michael Berdan smears his hateful, sneering voice into the mix just enough to register clips of what he’s screaming about—like hearing a madman from afar trying to reason with his own vanishing sanity. v
NYC duo Uniform sneak some hooks into their damaged industrial music
