Uniform (Photo by Ebru Yildiz)
Uniform’s “Dispatches from the Gutter” comes with a momentous video from filmmaker and director Jacqueline Castel.
“The video was approached as a documented mass sigil informed by the historical and philosophical concept of self-immolation, performed under the lunar eclipse of Independence Day,” Jacqueline said. “Participants were asked to bring personal offerings to burn, and were given a directive to write down their intentions for the future, which were attached with accelerants to an effigy that was later cremated. It was a symbolic act of releasing what we wish to abandon, and an invocation of what we wish to rebuild.”
Uniform’s vocalist Michael Berdan added, “Aside from being a dear friend, Jacqueline has been a favorite director of all of ours for a very long time. Her stark aesthetic and eye for detail is without parallel. No one could have been better suited to create a visual representation of this song. Dispatches from the Gutter takes equal inspiration from Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke. It is about the fine line that many of us live on between times of relative stability and utter chaos, and what life is like once that fragile threshold is breached.”
Watch the official music video for “Dispatches from the Gutter” by Uniform on YouTube:
What if the antihero in your favorite film or book had no chance to repent, reconcile, or redeem himself? There’s no victim to rescue. There’s no evil to thwart. There’s no tyranny to turnover. Instead of saving the day against his better judgment, he just walks a Sisyphean circle of existential malaise doomed to repeat yesterday’s vices without the promise of a better tomorrow. Rather than tell this story on the screen or on the page, Uniform tell it on their fourth full-length album, Shame.
The trio — Michael Berdan, Ben Greenberg (guitar, production), and Mike Sharp (drums) — strain struggle through an industrialized mill of grating guitars, warped electronics, war-torn percussion, and demonically catchy vocalizations.
Shame is out Sept. 11 on Sacred Bones.