Label: Urinal Cake Records – UC-08
Format: Vinyl, LP, Album
Country: US
Released: 2012
Genre: Rock
Style: Garage Rock, Post-Punk

Tracklist

A1 In My Sphere 3:44
A2 Machinist Man 2:44
A3 Hot Wheel City 1:35
A4 3 Swallows 2:21
A5 Free Supper 3:12
A6 Jumbo's 4:28
B1 Ypsilanti 3:12
B2 Too Many Jewels 3:51
B3 (Don't You) Call Me Out My Name 1:06
B4 How He Lived After He Died 2:54
B5 Feral Cats 2:51
B6 Wine Of Ape 1:21
B7 Principalities 3:40

"Although Protomartyr's debut album takes several Detroit reference points in its stride, it's more than "a Detroit record": Their characters aren't hollow archetypes, but people with ideas, struggles, and stories set to dextrously played speed punk, psych melodies, and gentle fingerpicking.

It's easy to speculate what kind of impact the city of Detroit has on a Detroit-based artist's work. With the general perception of the city's decay (and its "halftime in America" stereotype), anything "angry" in a song could quickly and cheaply be attributed to the artist's surroundings. Maybe that's partially due to some long-held MC5- or Ted Nugent-based aggression archetype. On some records, though, Detroit's presence is pretty well spelled out. Tyvek's last one, for example, had "Wayne County Roads". Similarly, Protomartyr don't hide their hometown on No Passion All Technique, their debut album. There's "Jumbo's", which is about the bar in Midtown, and "Ypsilanti", a city 40 minutes away. On their debut album, they tell stories set in these places (and others), and back them with a diverse rock'n'roll ecosystem.

"Machinist Man" is the story of a night foreman who works all week in the city. Come the weekend, he's drinking High Life after High Life. But then, Protomartyr counterbalance the foreman's story with this sentence: "There are things that are built in the skulls of men." And that line, bellowed in Joe Casey's baritone, embodies why No Passion All Technique isn't just "an album about Detroit". It's set in Detroit, its characters live in and around Detroit, but this album is bigger than one place. Protomartyr's characters are more than hollow archetypes or faceless B-roll factory workers from Searching for Sugar Man. These are people with ideas, struggles, and stories. The three schizophrenic gentlemen detailed in "Ypsilanti", for example: One of them throws books out windows, one of them "could still punch through walls," and the third delivers an enigmatic monologue: "Call me not interference, my name is I.R. Dung. If I see my hands, sir, I know they do no wrong."

These are stories delivered with an alarming amount of sonic dexterity. While "Hot Wheel City" has the anthemic rafter reach of a Hold Steady track, "Free Supper" is pure speed punk. "Jumbo's" falls into a droning, hypnotic psych melody, and though it stays on a specific course, it keeps gradually fluctuating in volume, suddenly adding layers of instruments and suddenly stripping them away. Then there's something like "Three Swallows"-- paced, fingerpicked, warm. There, the band quietly ruminates on drinking-- a topic All Passion No Technique picks up a few times-- plus loss, aging, and heartbreak. It's a devastating and human track, and the song doesn't settle for sonic or tonal simplicity. Midway through, it gets a set of loud and chunky acid-washed guitars. After about two minutes, it's over way too soon.

Scouring the lyrics sheet for No Passion All Technique, you'll find cold detachment and cynicism all over the place. "Jumbo's" opens with the rigidly delivered line, "I will touch the screen no more/ I will not have a drink." But this album is never bitter, and it's never a slog. A song like "Feral Cats" even borders on absurdity. Frantic instrumentals accompany Casey's vocals, which are paranoid about dust, nurses, and warfare. Then, with a big triumphant hook and a shouted vocal, they sing, "Just like feral cats!" Is this a joke? Is this legitimate concern, like how we should probably honest-to-god fear feral pigs? It's a song delivered with either gravity or a smirk, and either way, it's a great song.

What's refreshing about No Passion All Technique is its lack of immediate sonic reference points. There are loose ones-- vocals like Nick Cave, punk guitars-- but this is a record in its own universe. There's jittery instrumentals, cynicism, and paranoia, sure, but you can't define it by those things. There's also heartwrenching loss and awesome guitar solos. And there's a humanness and empathy to this material that's increasingly rare in rock songs. For a debut LP, No Passion All Technique is an impressive showing of sonic, lyrical, and emotional range, and it all falls under a cohesive banner.

7.8 by Evan Minsker Deputy News Editor June 17 2013"
https://pitchfork.com/reviews....chnique

full album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnQXxUvAbcI

Label: Hardly Art – HAR-081
Format: CD, Album
Country: US
Released: 2014
Genre: Rock
Style: Post-Punk, Goth Rock

Tracklist

1 Maidenhead 3:39
2 Ain't So Simple 2:18
3 Want Remover 2:30
4 Trust Me Billy 2:14
5 Pagans 1:11
6 What The Wall Said 3:11
7 Tarpeian Rock 2:03
8 Bad Advice 2:41
9 Son Of Dis 1:09
10 Scum, Rise! 2:37
11 I Stare At Floors 2:23
12 Come & See 3:57
13 Violent 1:52
14 I'll Take That Applause 2:55

Companies, etc.
Recorded At – Key Club Recording

"On their debut album No Passion All Technique, Detroit's Protomartyr excelled at crafting a post-punk onslaught that was thrillingly breakneck and oppressive, showcasing a new band capable of stomping, shredding, and obliterating. On their follow-up, they've cleaned up their sound a bit and sanded down a few of their rough edges without becoming tepid or tame.

On their debut album No Passion All Technique, Detroit's Protomartyr excelled at crafting a post-punk onslaught that was thrillingly breakneck and oppressive, showcasing a new band capable of stomping, shredding, and obliterating. The songs ranged from anthemic and rafter-reaching to churning and bleak, grounded by frontman Joe Casey's deep, looming vocals that moved seamlessly from a croon to a deranged bark. It was an impressive showing of both mastery and versatility.

On their follow-up, Under Color of Official Right, they've cleaned up their sound a bit and sanded down a few of their rough edges without becoming tepid or tame. This time around, the band's embraced a consistent ebb and flow, continually shifting back and forth from simmer to full-boil. For listeners well-versed in No Passion's steadfast ferocity, this new one may appear comparatively declawed, but the more subtle approach comes with more tonal and emotional nuance. Greg Ahee's ringing, hollow guitar clack on "Bad Advice" gives weight and urgency to a narrative about Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, while the tenderness of Scott Davidson's slow-burning bass intro on "What the Wall Said" is a perfect counterbalance to an imminent and overwhelming barrage of guitars. "Come & See" begins with guitar chords that are given space to ring before being enveloped by huge, oppressive waves of guitars, and the effect is oddly uplifting. The hooks are diverse in mood—dark, subtle, playful—but just as cohesive and powerful as they were on their first outing.

As they did with No Passion, Protomartyr seal the deal with Casey's lyrics. Often inspired by books and news stories and filtered through the band's deadpan abstractions, they don't always make perfect sense right away. Album opener "Maidenhead" is directly influenced by Patrick Hamilton's black comedy novel Hangover Square. It's about George Harvey Bone, a lonely alcoholic who suffers from spells where he feels no pleasure or pain. Casey sings about a "clack" in his brain, which triggers "dead moods". At the chorus, drummer Alex Leonard and Ahee ramp up their attack, and when things cool down again, Casey sings, "Maidenhead, here I come," referring to the happy place where Bone longs to return—where he can finally find respite from the darkness. "I have arrived."

But here's the hitch: When Bone reaches Maidenhead in the book, he isn't peaceful there—he's just as tortured as he always was. And as Protomartyr push out into the rest of their album, they're still mired in darkness. They outline betrayal, treason, extortion, corruption, bad dads, insufferable randos, and of course, violence. It's tempting to comb through the album to find clues that reveal Casey's initial inspirations, but going line by line and decoding its "secrets" is about as arbitrary a practice as naming every sample on a Girl Talk album: it's nice to know the details, but look at the big picture instead. The overall strength of Under Color of Official Right doesn't come from its big words, Detroit cred, or works-cited page; it's from lyrics that, while fraught with symbolism, feel emotionally resonant and, sometimes, viscerally unpleasant. If you listen carefully to Casey's voice, this stuff can hit hard.

Perhaps it's the seething, self-assured vocals, but the album's most bleak phrases are also some of its most memorable. "Stumbling around for a hand in the dark/ Slapping you down, choking you out," he casually croons on "What the Wall Said". A vengeful son kills off a pack of barfly dads in "Scum, Rise!", while Davidson locks into a rollicking groove during "Tarpeian Rock", named for the Ancient Roman cliff where murderers and traitors were flung for their crimes. Casey lists the different sorts of people who should meet their demise—emotional cripples, internet personas, rich crusties, adults dressed as children, and so on—while his swirling, primal vocals insist, "THROW THEM FROM THE ROCK".

Amid all the chaos and fuzz, the album's crown jewel might be "Violent"—the most calm, spare track of the bunch. It's a bedtime story with multiple layers: a bandit about to kill a man for snoring too loud, a dark shape in the water that's about to sink a boat, a husband poisoning his wife, cats hunting mice, dogs eating their young. "If it's violent, it's understood," sings Casey, and that's the reality they present throughout Under Color of Official Right: no matter where you look—in books, at your loved ones, at your pets, at the sports bar—there's violence and death and destruction. It's a bummer, but at least Protomartyr wrote and recorded an impressive album around that idea.

8.1 by Evan Minsker Deputy News Editor April 7 2014"
https://pitchfork.com/reviews....l-right

full album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2th0SCqOL8

$10 USD or more
https://protomartyr.bandcamp.com/album/under-color-of-official-right

Label: Hardly Art – HAR-091
Format: CD, Album
Country: US
Released: 09 Oct 2015
Genre: Rock
Style: Post-Punk

Tracklist

1 The Devil In His Youth 2:38
2 Cowards Starve 3:37
3 I Forgive You 3:01
4 Boyce Or Boice 3:38
5 Pontiac 87 4:31
6 Uncle Mother's 4:20
7 Dope Cloud 2:57
8 The Hermit 2:32
9 Clandestine Time 3:08
10 Why Does It Shake 4:46
11 Ellen 6:22
12 Feast Of Stephen 2:25

"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.

8.2 by J. Edward Keyes Contributor October 7 2015"
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20966-the-agent-intellect/

full album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB_VPDXAhKU

$10 USD or more
https://protomartyr.bandcamp.com/album/the-agent-intellect

Label: Domino – WIGCD402
Format: CD, Album
Country:
Released: 2017
Genre: Rock
Style: Post-Punk

Tracklist

1 A Private Understanding
2 Here Is The Thing
3 My Children
4 Caitriona
5 The Chuckler
6 Windsor Hum
7 Don't Go to Anacita
8 Up The Tower
9 Night-Blooming Cereus
10 Male Plague
11 Corpses In Regalia
12 Half Sister

"The fourth album from the literary Detroit rock band Protomartyr is sinuous and allusive, dense and at times dizzying. It contains a constant sense of unease about the world and its future.

In the middle of Protomartyr’s fourth LP, Relatives in Descent, frontman Joe Casey’s phone rings. It’s a telemarketer named Lazlo dialing in from Bangalore, or maybe Mahabalipuram. Most of us would probably send Lazlo straight to voicemail, but then again, Casey isn’t most of us. So he and his faraway friend get to chatting. “All calls are answered,” Casey explains. “I just wanted to talk.”

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of topics broached on Relatives of Descent: talking horses, night-blooming cacti, the Flint water crisis, the glum sterility of gentrified neighborhoods, the long-awaited irrelevancy of garbage-brained Bukowski acolytes. I could go on; Casey certainly would. Few bands offer up quite as much text as Protomartyr do. The Detroit foursome’s fourth album is, like every Protomartyr album before it, a loose-lipped, allusion-loaded saga, the sound of a scarily smart dude plunging the vast recesses of his mind, looking to make some sense of an increasingly senseless world. Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Sonny DiPerri (Avey Tare, Dirty Projectors), Relatives is probably the least Detroit-centric Protomartyr release yet. Though the band has often bristled at the notion that they’re strictly a Motor City concern, past albums have found them conjuring a kind of half-mythical Detroit with burned-out buildings and street-corner sages.

Most of Relatives was written in the wake of the 2016 election, with the abhorrent situation in nearby Flint never far from Casey’s mind. Direct references to Trump aren’t exactly easy to pluck from the maelstrom of Relatives, but there’s an overarching sense of unease about the future—“dread 2017-18, airhorn age, age of horn-blowing,” he offers on the especially rambly “Here Is the Thing”—permeating the album’s every dark corner. Casey has said his lyrics here are largely concerned with the unknowability of truth, the cloud of uncertainty that seems to hang over everything in this era of fake news and real shit.

But the so-called Paris of the Midwest still casts a shadow over the proceedings. “Windsor Hum” sees Casey gazing wistfully across the Detroit River into Canada, wondering how much better things really are in the country to the north. But the temporary relocation to Tinseltown seems to have widened Casey’s perspective. “Caitriona” finds him touching down in County Galway—he’s been reading Máirtín Ó Cadhain—while snarling closer “Half Sister” flits from ancient Palestine to a South Carolina racetrack to a northern Michigan horse farm.

This expansive lyrical tack is met more than halfway by Casey’s bandmates. The grisly, subterranean propulsion of Protomartyr’s early records now sports more twists and turns than Detroit’s mazy Outer Drive. Guitarist Greg Ahee’s roundabout leads buzz and flash of neon on wet pavement. But wherever the band can get a word in edgewise, they add new wrinkles. Flickers of strings, dead-of-night synth washes, stereo-panned drum work from Alex Leonard—it’s all in there somewhere, each element elbowing its way into the fray as these songs double-back on themselves. Lyrical motifs recur all the while; Relatives is somehow an even windier affair than 2015's byzantine The Agent Intellect, the band matching Casey tangent-for-tangent.

Protomartyr songs don’t always contain a clear beginning, middle, and end. Casey is less interested in story than backstory, in explaining exactly how his subjects became so fucked. When it works, it’s brilliant as ever; when it doesn’t, it can feel unknowable, disjointed, a series of red herrings taking the approximate shape of a song. And by inching away from the Detroit-centered world-building of previous Protomartyr records, Casey’s sacrificed a certain amount of the thematic consistency that’s helped past records hold their center; these songs here, for better and worse, splay out all over the map.

It’s been said that Protomartyr records don’t really click until after the fifth or sixth listen. The same is no less true here; it takes time to catch every reference. But every second song takes a sharp left each time Casey takes a badly-deserved breath, and Relatives gets to feeling a bit muddled. A couple of Relatives’ more straightaway rockers lose a little Casey in the mix, while the bordering-on-proggy constructions of some of these tunes can feel scattershot. The band’s tenacity has always made for a solid counterpoint to Casey’s frequent lyrical detours. On Relatives, they’re nearly as prone to digression as Casey, and the effect can be dizzying. Closer “Half-Sister” is up there with Protomartyr’s finest: a rumbling bassline, a gnashing guitar lick, Casey gone intercontinental. It works so well largely because the track doesn’t attempt to outdo Casey, egging him on without crowding him out.

On the one hand, bless Protomartyr for making records like these: wordy, sinuous, all but designed to buck the modern one-and-done listener. Until you take the time to pore over Relatives at a near-forensic level, the whole thing's likely to feel a bit intimidatingly dense. But there are no casual Protomartyr fans—Protomartyr fans, as a rule, are not the casual type—and Relatives is destined to be the favorite of some diehards. For those whose interest in the band stops just short of obsession, there’s something to be said for the punchiness of the earlier, more compact work. As long as the world keeps crumbling around us, though, Protomartyr won’t want for material, and Relatives is another solid entrant in a catalog well worth poring over. Still, it’s easy to come out of the wildly exhaustive, borderline exhausting Relatives feeling a little like poor Lazlo, your ear talked clean off your head.

6.9 by Paul Thompson Contributor October 2 2017"
https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/protomartyr-relatives-in-descent/

"In coming from a bankrupt city as dramatic as Detroit, Protomartyr attract one prevailing, flimsy comment – how their dejected-sounding post-punk could only come from that deserted place. Iggy & The Stooges are thrown in to bolster the idea even though it pulls it apart when you consider how Protomatyr’s music is so wiry and dry and clearly more at home in 1970s Manchester. Comparisons to The Fall (of which there are also a lot) ring far truer, and they never even went to Detroit.

Truth is a big theme on ‘Relatives In Decent’, joining the heavy sense of unexpected hope in resignation that’s filled the band’s previous three albums and is still present here in Joe Casey’s cryptic lyrics. Casey still mumbles and slurs to make lines rhyme even when they don’t. With his words in front of you it’s still difficult to decipher exactly what he means, which helps the album steer clear of being a tacky “fake news” concept piece. Protomartyr are smarter than that and Casey’s love for language and James Joyce chatters through the half-cut yabber of ‘Here Is The Thing’ (a drunk’s version of the facts) and murmurs through the chug of ‘Half Sister’, which contains fictional news stories about talking horses.

A lot of the tracks come in pairs, eschewing which is true, if any. Opener ‘A Private Understanding’ says it all, although unpicking Casey’s input is just one way to pore over a punk record as expertly played as this, from every slow build, every dark groove, every moment of hidden beauty.

10/10 Words by Danny Canter"
http://www.loudandquiet.com/reviews/protomartyr-relatives-descent/

$9.99 USD
https://protomartyr.bandcamp.com/album/relatives-in-descent

full album: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcLgfcB5yPE



интересный альбом. на 4. саунд навороченный, нужно врубаться в эти сплетения гитар и барабанов. на мой слух в целом похоже на Joy Division и Nick Cave, только звук посовременее выглядит.