Protomartyr - Relatives in Descent

Name: Protomartyr - Relatives in Descent Review
Item: Relatives in Descent
Author: Dork

The relentless, shapeless gloom can get a bit much.

Words: Dork

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Released: 29th September 2017

In these troubled times, ‘In these troubled times…’ has become a reviewing crutch almost as wearying as the act of switching the news on - or swiping down to refresh - itself: what fresh hell awaits? Music is expected to be a comforting balm, a joyous distraction, or to confront the encroaching horrors with righteous vitriol, often all at the same time.

Now Detroit’s Protomartyr wade in, following 2015’s well-received ‘The Agent Intellect’ with a fourth LP, tackling the fake news age and universal skepticism. “There’s no shared reality,” ponders singer Joe Casey. “Maybe there never was.” But rather than hitting it head-on, ‘Relatives In Descent’ prefers poetry to punches, abstracts to anger; a postpunk fog to passion and fury.

This works well in places - the stumbling, stuttering discord of the opening ‘A Private Understanding’, steadily building to a thundering chorus; ‘My Children’’s bruising melody; or ‘Here Is The Thing’ - like The Fall meets, well, The Fall, down to Casey’s occasional Mark E. Smith-ian -ahs at the ends of lines - but the relentless, shapeless gloom can get a bit much.

‘The Chuckler’ seems to recognise this, sarcastically suggesting “I guess I’ll keep on chuckling/till there’s no more breath in my lungs”, but there’s little to recommend the dreary likes of ‘Windsor Hum’ or ‘Up The Tower’, where a nicely gathering tension leads to an exercise in making nothing out of something.

Only ‘Male Plague’ and ‘Night Blooming Cereus’ buck the trends, the first reading like a fairly direct swipe at toxic masculinity, and the second - “Only in darkness does the flower take hold/It blooms at night” - finding occasional patches of colour, and hope, amid darkness. We could do with a few more - both here, and in these troubled times. Rob Mesure