Album Review: Protomartyr – ‘The Agent Intellect’


protomartyr




Now in disgraceful middle age, punk rock is allowed to wear a coat of many colours (although on weekends it chills in a pair of old tracksuit bottoms).

Wrecked in the early days by a suffocating sense of conformity, in its fifth decade the movement is now host to many identities, a creatively diverse roster with only the narrowest of threads holding it all together.

Formed in Detroit in 2008, Protomartyr are part of a loose alumni that includes, amongst others, the likes of Cerebral Ballzy and Metz, but lacking their aggression; think of Richman doing ‘Roadrunner‘ with that stunning, monotone blankness and you’re halfway there.

The band’s third album, ‘The Agent Intellect‘, is an exercise in cauterised rawness and understated power, singer Joe Casey delivering his observations in phrasing that’s part affected art school scat, part disinterested beat poet on the come down. Of course, there’s vague antecedence in the cultural ghosts of their home town, but its granite toughness and urban decay are far from the whole story in terms of inspirations; Casey equally admits that without the band he’d probably be stagnating for loose change in a bar circuit covers outfit.

Casey and guitarist Greg Ahee, drummer Alex Leonard and bassist Scott Davidson may well have been as surprised as anyone when their last release ‘Under Colour Of Official Right‘ was critically lauded, but its contrasting atonal sludge and clear lines were gifts for the heart, head and those club footed, geeky persona non gratis everywhere.

Here, opener ‘The Devil In His Youth‘ is all mike stand belligerence, choppy, furious guitar and crisp, neat drum lines, the words pouring out across the song like a shopping list or lost Old Testament Psalm. Dimensions are all over, obtuse angles, itchy stuff which jars but compels; on ‘Cowards Starve‘ the chords feel stretched and malign, like denuded trees by an endless roadside, whilst on ‘I Forgive You‘ an obvious debt to The Fall‘s early piss-and-vinegar rockabilly is paid with alacrity.

The work of free thinkers then, but punk’s essence was always notionally in refusal to play by anyone’s rules, the moment that we understand it being the one in which it passes into commodity. Protomartyr wear their noise and ambiguous world-view like medals, the pathological liars of ‘The Hermit‘ wilfully unidentified, whilst on the misanthropic ‘Why Does It Shake‘ – opening line, “False happiness is on the rise/Feel the victims piled high”, – the tension builds from a conversation to a scream, excess mood piled up on a fucks-not-given wail of strained instruments.

Were ‘The Agent Intellect’ just the sum of those parts – the foursome began work with over a hundred fragments at the beginning of the recording process – it would be merely interesting. But there are songs here too, damn good, footappin’ ones such as ‘Pontiac ’87‘, whose chiming riff brings to mind The Horrors during their ‘Skying‘ period, whilst Casey wrote ‘Ellen’ as an ode to his mother from the point of view of his now dead father.

The album’s fulcrum whirls around ‘Dope Cloud‘, a mendacious cautionary tale by which, over a hip-shaking boogie, he reminds us that accumulations of neither god nor money can stop us ending life as we began it. In the meantime of course we can do this, and that, and dance like the devil was on our tail, his pitchfork jabbing our asses like Protomartyr on a two day jaunt.



There are worse things that could happen in the world, trust us.

(Andy Peterson)


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