Protomartyr - The Agent Intellect (2015)

The third album from Detroit post-punk outfit Protomartyr ups the ante considerably from the first two. Their grim but compelling songs highlight a place where violence hovers constantly at the periphery, where peace and hope gradually curdle and turn ugly, and the desperate people who once clung to them eventually fall prey to their worst impulses.

In what feels like an odd moment of prescience, roughly halfway through The Agent Intellect, the harrowing third album from the Detroit band Protomartyr, the Pope pays a visit. It’s 1987 in Pontiac, Mich., and Pope John Paul II is visiting the Silverdome, delivering Mass to the 100,000 faithful who’d come to hear him speak. Among them was a young Joe Casey who, 25 years later, would grow up to become Protomartyr’s frontman. The event was historic—it set an attendance record at the arena—but what Casey remembers about it in "Pontiac 87" isn’t the beauty of the sermon or the spectacle in the ceremony, but the ugliness boiling just beneath the surface. On his way into the arena, he sees "money changing between hands," and on his way out, a riot, where "Old folks turn brutish/ Trampling their way out the gates towards heaven."

This is the universe Protomartyr inhabits, one where violence hovers constantly at the periphery, where peace and hope gradually curdle and turn ugly, and the desperate people who once clung to them eventually fall prey to their worst impulses. The emotionally brutal Under Color of Official Right from 2014 took place against the crumbling skyline of Detroit, where deadbeat fathers disappeared into bars while their children planned revenge at home and politicians made backwards deals that benefited no one but themselves. On Intellect, Casey’s got bigger matters on his mind. The first character we meet on the record is, literally, the Devil, but he doesn’t have red horns and a trident, and he’s not cackling in a smoldering cavern. He’s a teenager in his bedroom at home, full of promise and almost dewy-eyed naiveté until his peers shun him and all of his grand plans fail, and he’s left at the end of the song vowing, "I will make them feel the way I do/ I’ll corrupt them ‘til they think the way I do." If Right was about the evil that men do, Intellect goes one bigger and asks why they do it. The answer, again and again, is rooted in hurt, pain, neglect, and disappointment.

Intellect draws its energy from the panic of mortality. Casey lost his father to a heart attack and his mother to Alzheimer’s disease as he was writing the record, and their presence on Intellect provides some of its most wrenching emotional moments. His mother arrives strong and determined on the grim, booming "Why Does It Shake?", swearing, "Lithe in thought and pumping blood…I’m never gonna lose it," but suddenly the song collapses and decays. It concludes with the chilling appearance of "the stranger" who, in Casey’s words, always wins—"He enters the temple/ It falls/ It always falls." The song’s title comes from something Casey’s mother said, noticing the tremors of old age in her hands. That sound of the ticking clock makes all of the violence and drunkenness on Intellect seem that much more desperate, that much more futile.

Throughout the album, the band rises to meet the weighty subject matter. On Right, songs arrived in brute slashes, but on Intellect they’re textured and spacious. Guitarist Greg Ahee cloaks "Cowards Starve" in a Morricone-like cowboy flange, gradually gathering tension until the song detonates in the chorus. "Dope Cloud" rides a razor-wire post-punk guitar line as its protagonists accumulate treasure only to be met with Casey’s bleak reminder, "That’s not gonna save you, man." And in "Ellen", a love song written from the perspective of Casey’s father to his mother, they beautifully underplay, supporting the song’s sweet sentiment in feathery chords.

But it is Casey who has undergone the greatest evolution. Casey has described his stage demeanor as "30 minutes of a fat guy yelling at you," but on Intellect, he’s more measured, and his writing has developed an almost Joycean grasp of detail and narrative. The second verse of "Pontiac 87" feels like something that could have turned up in "The Dead": a crowd of regulars pile into the Detroit bar Jumbo’s (familiar to Protomartyr fans from its appearance on No Passion All Technique) the day after Christmas. Casey describes the scene with such stunning narrative economy you can almost see the lines on their faces: "Remembering a Jumbo’s night, December 26th/ Weird faces filled up the bar, half sober/ Outside, a steady snow—all new white." He’s also become a powerful, passionate singer. His delivery throughout Intellect has gravity and nuance; he’s able to make a sing-along out of the line "Social pressures exist/ And if you think about them all of the time/ You’re gonna find that your head’s been kicked in." He goes from baleful and bereft to nasty and snarling, commanding “Destroy the gateway, bind them up, break the circuit, cast them out.”

And what he’s driving at, again and again, is that we do all of those things when we feel like trapped animals, when we’ve thrown our full bodies into life and it’s given us nothing back but loneliness and poverty and emptiness, and each advancing year is less time we have to do something of substance. It’s a profound and uncomfortable truth, and it’s one that The Agent Intellect unflinchingly stares down.

All of this is highlighted to shattering effect in "Uncle Mother’s". At first, it seems like another in a long line of Protomartyr bar tableaus, the battered working class piling into a dive to suck down Old Styles until the world seems bearable again. The revelation of the song’s true meaning comes in what at first feels like a throwaway detail. At the start of the song, Casey advises, "Welcome to Uncle Mother’s/ Leave your children in the car." From there the carousing begins, and the usual boxes are checked: there’s a drug deal in the kitchen and bad doings in the back corner. But at the end of the song, Casey repeats himself, and turns a declarative into a question: "Welcome to Uncle Mother’s/ Are your children still in the car?" In that moment it becomes clear that the subject of the song isn’t the drunks—it’s the children. That subtle shift is what gives the record its almost palpable sense of humanity, of sorrow, of compassion. On The Agent Intellect, we are all the children, shivering alone in an empty station wagon in a bitter Detroit night, waiting in vain for someone to come and take us home.