Protomartyr deliver a career best.
Poor old Joe Casey, the guy just can’t catch a break.
Talking before the release of Formal Growth In The Desert, he shared that recently a few misguided critics had described Protomartyr as not post-punk, but not post-punk enough, as if there was some sort of cache to be had by merely cranking out authentic facsimiles of Ian Curtis tributes.
Protomartyr’s rustle-larynxed singer could afford to laugh, but only just. For more than a decade now, since the release of their debut album All Passion No Technique, the quartet have evolved a reputation for music with a bleak-but-beautiful aesthetic, in the process slowly evolving for those who care into the cult band’s cult band. That said, the job isn’t a very lucrative one.
The tapered edge of Protomartyr’s newest album was fueled as ever by Casey’s restless sensibility. During the writing process his mother passed away and, now living in the house he’d shared with his parents for decades, he came to the realisation that in a subtle way the domesticity had been an unrecognised burden.
What happened next is addressed directly on We Know The Rats as the singer recounts the property being burgled, calling the police and then being told there’s nothing they could do despite having the identity of the perps. Welcome to Detroit.
Neither he nor anybody else in the group will ever misplace the city however. Despite being recorded in a small Texas town situated on the edge of one, Formal Growth In The Desert is, the band have said, 100% rooted in Detroit, to the extent that 3800 Tigers – home to a raging wash of guitars and on which they’ve rarely sounded as alive – is both a reference to the endangered wild animal and the local baseball team, one that have been heroically dodging success for decades.
Casey’s foil Greg Ahee has extended the musical patina to include acoustic and pedal steel guitars, the presence of which is as keenly felt as anywhere on opener Make Way, the result a kind of shattered, haunted country punk that will confront some longer established fans’ views of who and what they are as an entity.
Letting light in then? Well, yes – and no. The feeling is as intense, almost claustrophobic, as ever on Elimination Dances, the chopped guitar phrases squared with lyrics about human disposability, and Fun In Hi Skool, the trademark bellow skewering the false construct of an existence having peaked before it should have even begun.
Sometimes these words feel like they come from someone wounded right in the room, such as when on Polacrilex Kid on which the question is, ‘Can you hate yourself and still deserve love?’, the stream of consciousness delivered prose tumbling out against riffs that veer in tone from skeletal to almost triumphant. On Let’s Tip The Creator there’s at least a discernible enemy in those who trivialize art’s worth and want to own it all for nothing, but the desultory mood is of resignation, not defiance.
All that’s gone before – grief, despair, anger, even optimism – is brewed up into the closer Rain Garden. ‘I’m deserving of love’, Casey says on the first song dedicated to it he’s ever written, the tumbling walls of noise wrapping round him almost protectively, the kind of protective shell his audience have always offered him.
Of course, Michigan’s best kept secret could’ve made everything sound a bit more old and recycled, but instead Formal Growth In The Desert marks a leap of faith that’s handsomely rewarded, Protomartyr’s best album of what’s been a uniquely idiosyncratic journey to date.