Protomartyr “Hotel Usona” Review
Written by Blake Peck
ALBUM OF THE MONTH: SEPTEMBER
Protomartyr make their case for “Detroit's finest” as they check into Hotel Usona only to blow the roof off.
I first got into Protomartyr while working at a prop warehouse in Long Island City, back when it was still an industrial wasteland and hadn't yet become another stack of glass condos. I got there by train or on foot, through steel and concrete and cold. The soundtrack to that bleak, gray stretch of my life was their album, Relatives in Descent.
Joe Casey's baritone made total sense in that landscape. The music felt like it was coming out of the buildings: unforgiving, mechanical, sometimes beautiful and always about to fall apart. Hotel Usona takes that same industrial desolation and blows the walls out. The machinery is still running, you can just see a lot further now.
Check out our track-by-track Album of the month review for Protomartyr - Hotel Usona
"The Old Hotel" gets right to it. A slow intro erupts into a bombastic rhythm, then drops into a dreamy, trumpet-led chorus with Casey's unmistakable delivery walking us through. For longtime fans it's a weird kind of comfort. Protomartyr is still Protomartyr, but you can tell right away this one is going somewhere new.
Lead single "Sounds We Cannot Hear" is the band at the height of its powers. Greg Ahee's command of tone is as sharp as ever, and the horns and more intricate arrangements open up a huge sense of possibility. It could easily have tipped into excess. It doesn't. Everything sits exactly where it should, and the sound stays impossible to mistake for anyone else's.
"Converts" slows things down. Delayed guitars wash over the verses like a tide, and you just rock back and forth with it. It's a gorgeous bit of restraint, proof that Protomartyr doesn't need aggression to hit hard. Sometimes letting the atmosphere swallow you whole is enough.
Then "Exalted Eagles" swings in. At the risk of beating a thoroughly dead horse, this might be the most dynamic Protomartyr has ever sounded, and once the break hits it's downright exhilarating. In his letter for this record, Iggy Pop mused that a Protomartyr is kind of like Jesus, and who am I to disagree? This song turns a boring commute into a military campaign. You think you're walking to the grocery store. Everyone around you is watching a man prepare to charge into battle. “He approves us!” Yes.. Yes, he does.
"The Knife Dream" gets sinister. A delicate piano intro sets up Casey at his stream-of-consciousness best, somewhere between spoken word, poetry and a fever dream.
Horns and rimshots creep out of the shadows as it builds, the unease turns haunting, and the reverb eats everything until the song drowns in melancholy. If you need more than hooks and choruses, this is the one to get lost in.
And then comes "Feed the Sewer"... finally, some aggression. It's a merciless rhythmic assault that beats you into submission and reminds you that under all the new sophistication, Protomartyr can still deliver an absolute beating. The sewer gets fed, and so does my soul. This is the stuff I'm always begging for, and exactly why I want more people to realize how great this band is.
"Lavender – Gospel" changes shape again. It's cathedral-like, built around a hypnotic loop that feels spiritual and otherworldly at once. I couldn't have imagined this kind of enchantment back in the warehouse days. It might be their most atmospheric and contemporary-sounding work yet, and none of the weirdness that makes them great got sanded off.
Protomartyr by by Trevor Naud
"Third Country" picks up that thread and runs somewhere else with it. There's something Parisian about the jazzy, melancholic verse, and Casey's narration eventually blooms into a huge eruption of horns. Underneath the elegance you can still hear the gothic, new wave and post-punk bones. It's romantic without getting sappy, the kind of song that leaves even a hardened cynic staring out a rain-soaked window. The romantics among us are absolutely fucked.
"Checking Out" closes things with the Detroit lads in top form. A relentless circular rhythm and a nagging snare hold up Casey's hypnotic chorus. You can hear The Fall and Wire in there, but Protomartyr pushes those influences into something ethereal and primal, a drone that folds in on itself and circles until the record ends.
What gets me about Hotel Usona is that nothing I originally loved about this band is gone. The industrial bleakness, the biting observations, the mechanical rhythms and Casey's singular voice are all still here. The world around them just got a lot bigger.
Relatives in Descent will always sound like that warehouse in Long Island City to me. Hotel Usona sounds like walking out the door and finding a completely different landscape. The city is still there, it's just a lot more beautiful, strange and terrifying than I remember.
Occult Highlights: "Exalted Eagles” "The Knife Dream" "Feed the Sewer" "Third Country"
(…but we recommend spinning it on repeat)
9.0/10
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