Protomartyr @ Broadcast, Glasgow, 2 Apr
This is not your typical rock’n’roll experience. The band barely acknowledge the audience. In between verses, the singer carries the air of a middle manager who’s just delivered a lengthy Powerpoint contribution to a notably tedious meeting. Later, he’ll bark one of their songs from underneath a towel. It’s a pretty typical show for Protomartyr, a Detroit band with all their home city’s high-energy looseness but a total inversion of rock’s normal relationship with tension and release, starting with the latter and putting the squeeze on every track until it bristles with nerves. It’s the chief reason why they’re utterly brilliant.
Almost an anti-frontman, replete with ill-fitting blazer and enormous St Andrew’s Cross belt buckle, even Joe Casey’s uncanny similarity to both 1980s Bob Mould and a down-at-heel David Cameron can’t prepare you for the gawk of the squawk; the facial contortions that accompany his gnarled proclamations seem perfectly pitched for these thoroughly unbeautiful pieces of rock’n’roll.
Latest album The Agent Intellect sees Protomartyr exploring mysterious Aristotelian concepts of conscious thought through fading religion, bleak humour and impoverished industrial landscapes – not immediately accessible stuff (at least thematically) but its visceral punch is undeniable, and that’s what comes to the fore in the live arena. It’s especially evident during the white-knuckle ride of Pontiac ’87 and Scum, Rise!, while Why Does It Shake? is a twinkle-toed slugger of a song, with its blunt, yell-along coda landing heavy blows across a heaving Broadcast dance floor.
The bro-dudes try to start the mosh, as bro-dudes are wont to do, but it feels like a mis-reading of the situation. Music this unsettling isn’t for slamdancing or beery singalongs; it’s much more absorbing than that. Much better to watch ‘em burn white-hot, leaving us to smoulder in the afterglow.
More live reviews from The Skinny:
Savages at the Art School, Glasgow
Clint Mansell at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall