American Standard begins with a shock. Vocalist Michael Berdan stands alone, screaming, “A part of me, but it can’t be me. Oh God, it can’t.” It all starts with an admission. Beneath the harrowing screams, there’s the pain of bulimia nervosa.There’s the pain of a sickness that is as physical as it is psychological. This is a kind of emergence.
With every movement of American Standard, Uniform peels off a new layer and tells the story inside of the one that came before it. The lyrics sink down into the core of the innermost self, the small human being crushed in the grip of sickness. To help peel away this narrative of eating disorders, self-hatred, delusion, mania, and ultimate discovery, Berdan sought assistance from a towering pair of outsider literary figures. Alongside B.R. Yeager (author of the modern cult-classic Negative Space) and Maggie Siebert (the mind behind the contemporary body horror masterpiece Bonding), the three writers eviscerate the personal material to present a portrait of mental and physical illness as vividly terrifying as anything in the present-day canon. The result is an acute articulation of a state beyond simple agony, capturing the thrilling transcendence and deliverance that sickness can bring in the process.
American Standard is surely Uniform’s most thematically accomplished and musically self assured album to date. Sections spiral and explode. Motifs drift off into obscurity before reasserting themselves with new power. Genres collide and burst open, forming something idiosyncratic and new. There’s a grandeur, due in part to the addition of Interpol bassist Brad Truax alongside the percussive push and pull of returning drummer Michael Sharp and longtime touring drummer Michael Blume, marking his Uniform recorded debut here. However, this magnificence is most clearly attributable to the scale and power of guitarist and founder Ben Greenberg’s arrangements, matching ever elegantly to the intense lyrical subject matter.
Without a shred of doubt, American Standard is a work of art, agonizing in its honesty and relentless in its pursuit of sonic transcendence. It is hideous. It is beautiful. It is necessary.
PHARMAKON
Maggot Mass, the fifth full-length album by Pharmakon on Sacred Bones Records, marks the project’s return after a five-year hiatus. This album signifies a departure from the original rules and structures established by Margaret Chardiet for Pharmakon, evolving into a new form. It retains the project’s experimental roots in power electronics and noise while incorporating industrial and punk influences.
The album stems from a profound disgust with humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with the environment and other life forms. It explores the loneliness resulting from this broken bond and challenges us to acknowledge our personal and systemic responsibility.
What peace can we make with privilege when the true cost of our comfort is not measured in dollars but in death? How can we reconcile with death when we impose the same hierarchical structures on it that we do in life? Is life worth living in the isolation of this self-imposed species loneliness?
Humans often measure worth by accumulation—money, assets, objects—mistaking this for power and influence. Western heritage dictates a hierarchy, placing humans at the top, separate from the natural world. This delusion turns bodies into objects, land into property, and people into expendable tools.
If our value were instead determined by our contribution to the ecosystem, who could claim that a human is more valuable than a maggot? Maggots recycle death into life, breaking down matter and nourishing new growth. They transform into flies, pollinating plants and sustaining the Earth’s flora. In contrast, humans pollute rather than pollinate, with a select few profiting from exploitation at the expense of biodiversity and the well-being of many.
In grappling with grief and loss on both personal and global scales, Margaret sought solace in the idea of rebirth through death, celebrating the beauty of regeneration through decay. However, she had to confront the stark reality of the disconnection from the earth under oppressive systems. Pharmakon is here imagining a path where the final act is to give back what was received from creation, offering our lives and deaths to sustain existence.
once I slough
off this human skin
I will find my home
and ancestral kin…
in the coffin-birth
of my cadaver’s ecosystem
TRUE BODY
☆*:.｡.pure signal.｡.:*☆
