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Sep 3, 2024From the vulnerability in Berdan’s scream to the elegant (no, really) arrangements, American Standard is never corny or contrived. It’s the year’s most intimate, most savage feel-bad music.
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Sep 3, 2024American Standard is, paradoxically, perhaps the band’s most straight-up listenable record while also their hardest to process thematically. .... It focuses in large part on a life lived with bulimia nervosa. Like the band’s four previous albums and sundry collaborations, these experiences are examined under a harsh, bright, unforgiving light in a manner that’s deeply unflattering but also cuttingly incisive.
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Sep 18, 2024It is, in every way, a transgressive, brutalist piece of art. In its unbelievable size and musical scope, it holds unnerving power, channeling the mind of someone suffering from this infliction Berdan sought to capture in disturbing forms. And yet, it also instills hope. It shows the artist willing to open up and reveal himself.
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Sep 9, 2024The shorter songs that compose the remainder of American Standard are just as uncompromising, and they also foreground the band’s gift for coupling a caustic, aggro sensibility with compelling melodic structures. Rarely has noise rock been so tuneful, and then also so awfully punishing.
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Sep 3, 2024If ever an album resisted sinking into algorithmic complacency and insisted on confronting the demands that drove its creation, this is it.