Photo by Zak Bratto
You wouldn’t expect it from his band’s brand of misanthropic post-punk, but Protomartyr frontman Joe Casey counteracts his woe-laden lyricism with plenty of jubilance in conversation. It’s an expectation amplified by the band’s third LP in as many years, this month’s The Agent Intellect, which is their heaviest work yet but also their most fertile. The curtains are again drawn expectedly tight, with the band leaving enough of a sliver to remind anyone listening that it’s still daytime. Speaking with Casey before Protomartyr’s Saturday stop at the Cactus Club, it sounds like he’s ready to get out of the summer sun and back in the bar.
“The thing about touring is one of the only real ways to make money is to play festivals,” he said. “I know from going to festivals as an audience member that unless I’m really into the band, I’m going to be more into talking with my friends. That can be disheartening to only be playing those kind of shows.”
It’s a decent lens through which to view Protomartyr’s work as a whole. At 38 years old, Casey’s shoulders have caught a good amount of sun, but the pasty underbelly nevertheless remains. This wrestling match between the vital and the ill shows up on Agent Intellect tracks like “Pontiac 87”—a song that frames his ambivalence about the band’s popularity against a childhood memory of seeing Pope John Paul II perform mass at the Silverdome, which, in spectacular Silverdome tradition, turned violent as people began to leave.
“It basically broke out into a riot, and it’s all of these old church people,” Casey said. “George [H.W] Bush was there when he was vice president. He flew in I guess what you call Air Force 2, the helicopter, so he was there taking off while there’s all of these people fighting. Thinking about it now, I felt like I was in Vietnam or something.”
Where other Detroit bands might relish the experience of rising toward the top of their scene the way Protomartyr has, Casey is concerned about feigned interest that’s solely motivated by a shared geography. He compares it to seeing things like folks in Kid Rock T-shirts at early White Stripes shows and the current whitewashing of his favorite local haunts.
“I like [the Detroit bar] Jumbos because it’s not a cool bar,” he said. “It’s a neighborhood bar, and that neighborhood is slowly starting to get gentrified. We play this show every day after Christmas there. As years have gone on, it’s gotten to be more and more of ‘Oh, this band I read about on the Internet is playing. Let’s go,’” he said. “So my friend jokes now, ‘Oh, Joe. You gentrified Jumbos!’ It’s that double feeling of ‘Oh, it’s great this place is packed, but it’s packed with people I don’t know.’”
Casey is quick to acknowledge that he doesn’t mean to knock their fans. If anything, he sounds a bit taken aback by the fact that there are any fans at all. When asked if he ever really imagined what sort of crowds he would be playing to, he says that he imagined them being “people his age who were drinkers”—a self-reflection that would still hold true for the vast majority of artists much less forthright than him.
What really diffuses some of Protomartyr’s too-old-to-give-a-shit belligerence is how gentle Casey has the capacity to be when he takes on subject matter that is more transcendent than weekend fodder. On “Ellen,” a song for his mother sung from the perspective of his deceased father, Casey sings with a placid clarity that allows for the younger bandmates to swirl a defiant storm around him. Even though Protomartyr’s songs can hit the hardest when Casey allows himself to undress a bit more, he still remains reluctant to drink from that well too frequently.
“I felt like my hand was forced in a sense in that I had to sing about something I actually kind of care about, because the music seemed to call for it in a weird way,” he said.
While Protomartyr is in a good place now, garnering the most attention of their career, they’ve expressed a collective desire to let the band run its course, whatever that may entail. Casey philosophizes in words that seem wholly aligned with his larger worldview.
“A band’s life, whether you want it to be or not, is kind of limited,” Casey said. “If you’re feeling the creative energy, and you’re feeling like things are going well, then you should really put your foot on the gas.”
Protomartyr play the Cactus Club with Amanda X on Saturday, Oct. 24 at 9:30 p.m.
