Those who face any kind of eating disorder, body dysmorphia and/or gender dysphoria know the agony of standing before a mirror and having it reflect back untold amounts of unwanted negativity and hatred. American Standard, the fifth album by these industrialised noise-rocking New York-based extremists, is comprised of songs tackling frontman Michael Berdan’s lifelong struggle with bulimia nervosa.
As such, the title track begins with Michael delivering an impassioned call-and-response: the call painfully laying bare his physical and mental state; the militaristic response spitting back the observations of his internal dialogue and perceived ravages that forced regurgitation has had on his frame. The delivery is excruciating and harrowing, but also clicks with the massive – in sound and scope – 21 minutes of stacked-chord guitars, grating noisescapes, atonal black metal machine-gunning and disturbing waves of doom-laden ambiance.
The excavation of Michael’s suffering body and soul continues throughout. This Is Not A Prayer and its collision of Fear Factory’s early, pre-industrial death metal years with the purgatorial clangour of Jim Thirwell’s Foetus project is put on violent display, while Clemency attaches vocal echoes to a hypnotic sequence that sounds like the controlled demolition of a stoner rock monolith initially propped up by High On Fire’s guitars and Boris’s penchant for milking lingering riffs ’til they’re bone dry.
Given its bald exploration of a difficult subject matter, as well as its lack of faithfulness to one particular sonic stead, expect American Standard to be a locus point for controversy. But this is not exploitative in the slightest. It may zero in on a triggering point, but the result is an album that exists as the emotional discharge of the wealth of complexities surrounding a debilitating issue. American Standard is true artistic expression.
American Standard is out August 23 via Sacred Bones.
