Hotel Usona, by Protomartyr
The central concept of Hotel Usona—the United States of America as a hotel—reveals itself with more subtlety than did the central theme of Hotel California. Then again, a post-punk Detroit band like Protomartyr should and does have more real-world perspective within its seventh LP than the Eagles did on their fifth.
The “post-” part of post-punk contributes to that perspective: while the Stooges or the White Stripes might have smashed the hotel’s windows and wiped blood from the breakage onto the bedsheets, Protomartyr moves from room to room with the fatigued assurance of a longtime resident.
Frontman and lyricist Joe Casey embodies and vocalizes the fatigue and assurance in tones that are often more transatlantic than American, like Nick Cave exploring the Deep South or The The’s Matt Johnson observing the kind of urban decay that Detroit practically models on a catwalk.
Yet Casey lives in the various rooms of Hotel Usona as much as he observes their transient inhabitants and worn furniture. In “The Old Hotel,” he digs a gulf of despairing sympathy under the refrain of “Welcome back,” and in “Lavender—Gospel,” he sings of death and danger as if he’s a reporter one or two more atrocities away from abandoning objectivity.
The other band members—Alex Leonard on drums, Scott Davidson on bass, and Greg Ahee on guitars, keyboards, xylophones, and more—careen around Casey in the Pixies-chorus bursts and muted jazz-rock verses of “Exalted Eagles,” the Catherine Wheel-meets-Pink-Floyd grind of “Feed the Sewer,” and the cacophony-bordering roundelay “Third Country.”
Producer Dave Fridmann keeps the atmosphere simultaneously airy and fetid; his son Jon Fridmann adds many wistful horns. At the end, with “Checking Out,” Protomartyr and Hotel Usona achieve the funereal lassitude of the late Irish post-punk musician Cathal Coughlan. The band and the album mourn the place the U.S.A. might have been.
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