On their fifth album, the Detroit post-punk band recruits a woodwind section for its most expansive statement yet.
The first four Protomartyr albums offered a compendium of America’s collective grief: unending wars, gentrification, the opioid epidemic, white supremacy, patriarchal hegemony—all our greatest hits. The fifth, Ultimate Success Today, appears to address our current twin crises: the global pandemic and the plague of police brutality in America. Will the apocalypse be “a foreign disease washed upon the beach,” frontman Joe Casey asks on “Processed By the Boys,” in his familiar wavering croon, or “a riot in the streets?”
But the album was written more than a year before this particular boiling pot overflowed, and Casey told Aquarium Drunkard that he had ICE in mind when he wrote the song. As usual, his lyrics report from a grim reality that isn’t confined to any particular moment in history. The titular “boys” could be buzz-cut behemoths in Punisher patches, Silicon Valley billionaires, legislators whistling dixie as they withhold health care and stimulus payments, or perhaps all of the above: Casey’s dystopia is the capitalistic system we suffer under until we’re ground to a nub.
Protomartyr has mastered telling this story through a noisy, claustrophobic style of post-punk. But on the band’s latest, most ambitious-sounding release, the band gets expansive. Recorded in a cavernous former church in upstate New York and co-produced by the band and David Tolomei (Girlpool, Beach House), Protomartyr strikes a balance on Ultimate Success Today, using familiar techniques—throbbing basslines, reverb-drenched guitar, syncopated drums, Casey’s droll delivery—but wading into deeper and murkier territory. After experimenting with some sparse bass clarinet, viola, and cello on 2018’s Consolation EP at the behest of collaborator Kelley Deal, the band took a dive into the woodwind section of the orchestra for the ensuing LP.
But this isn’t Protomartyr—now with bonus free jazz!, even though there is at least one woodwind instrument on every track from jazz musicians Jemeel Moondoc (alto saxophone) and Izaak Mills (saxophone, bass clarinet, flute) and with improvisor Fred Lonberg-Holm contributing cello to more than half of the songs. Moondoc’s deft improvisations on the haunting “Tranquilizer” boost the song’s swelling chorus, and Lonberg-Holm’s cello abrades the surface alongside Greg Ahee’s Sister-era Sonic Youth guitars. Moondoc doubles the melody line on verses in “The Aphorist,” replacing what might’ve been a synthesizer on previous records with a much warmer sound. On “June 21,” Half Waif’s Nandi Rose fuses her tranquil lilt with Casey’s baritone sing-speak to peel back the facade of a serene summer scene.
Casey has made a name for himself as a lyricist, and his lyrics are, as ever, dense with historical, literary, and mythological references. His “yellow Zephyr on blocks” on “June 21” refers to the Ford car (and perhaps Detroit auto industry at large), as his narrator feels the lowness of what is supposed to be a cheerful time of year. But a zephyr—named for Zephyros, the god of the west wind in Greek mythology—is a term for a gentle spring or summer breeze used to symbolize happiness and love, however fleeting. It’s blowing through city blocks, but can’t reach him through the “windows rust shut.”
But it gets darker. On “Worm in Heaven,” the album’s closer, Mills extends a sorrowful note for 30 seconds, setting the stage for the most purely beautiful and crushingly hopeless tune in the band’s discography, one in which Casey turns his crisis inward, imagining missing a chance at grace in life and “cleaning the gilded gutters,” in death. “Remember me, how I lived. I was frightened, always frightened,” he sings, the guitar melting away and ceding to Mills, before second guessing that he ever existed at all. It’s bleak, even for a guy who once wrote a song about the Flint water crisis as inspired by an 18th-century book called The Anatomy of Melancholy. Casey, having already plumbed the depths of sorrow, still has room to go deeper as Protomartyr’s sound continues to become much richer and more rewarding.
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