New Music (10.08.2015)

Protomartyr
The Agent Intellect

There is a story of a man who once saw something no one else could. Whether it was because they didn't or couldn't or wouldn't, no one saw what he saw, and it was a thing so beautiful that he fell to his knees and cried. Such is The Agent Intellect.

In songs like "Pontiac '87" and "Clandestine Time," Protomartyr describe, through nihilistic scenes of both past and future, the hopelessness of the post-recession rust belt, as well as the tragedy of living. But instead of treating hope as forbidden, it becomes the contraband chisel you will use to tunnel out of your self-made prison. This mood pervades The Agent Intellect, Protomartyr's third album, which only serves to further expand the group's palette of sound and create even greater sonic pleasures than their already storied sophomore effort, Under Color of Official Right.

Part Joy Division and part Radio Dept., Agent Intellect is both the album we need AND the one we deserve. The songwriting is complex and brilliant, debuting the band's first suite-like song, the lead single "Why Does It Shake?," which serves as a demonstration of both their significant braintrust and their ineluctable brawn.

There are insanely fantastic moments on the album: the transition from "Cowards Starve" to "I Forgive You" sounds like so much fun, you'll forget singer Joe Casey is trying to teach you a lesson; the extreme punk of "The Hermit" is so overwhelmingly jumpy that a mosh-pit forms in your brain; the gorgeous production of shoegaze ballad "Ellen" is so mesmerizingly resplendent you will lose yourself in time.

Nothing, and I mean nothing, compares to the talent on display here. Protomartyr on Agent Intellect are so above an beyond any of their peers it almost leads to jealousy. "False Happiness is on the rise / See the victims piled high," Casey sings, almost as an accusation pointed at the modern world. It is a theme that runs through the entire work, but it is one we must accept if we ever hope for catharsis. The Agent Intellect is so beautifully heartrending, the sadness transforms into transcendence--the apotheosis of a child's ghost.

Detroit may be the great American tragedy--a once proud, gleaming city on a hill now disheveled and mostly abandoned, made the object of condescending documentaries--but long held suffering leads to the best art. As the empty coal towns of Ohio and western Pennsylvania spawned Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, and birthed the industrial scene, so shall the desolate car factories and steel mills of Flint and Pontiac birth a new renaissance...with Protomartyr their Da Vinci.