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.
