"Burn. Rebuild," goes the caption at the conclusion of NYC industrialists Uniform's incendiary new music video, "Dispatches From the Gutter." The two minutes and 40 seconds that come before have got the burning part of that equation covered. Filmed on July 4th, "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," director Jacqueline Castel explains. "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."
As for the searing song — which is taken from Uniform's upcoming fourth full-length, Shame — vocalist Michael Berdan states, "'Dispatches from the Gutter' takes equal inspiration from Malcolm 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."
"'Dispatches from the Gutter" follows up June's "Delco," Shame's lead single. The album is due out on September 11th via Sacred Bones Records. It's available for pre-order now.
