Zak Bratto
Casey (right) got personal with his lyrics for The Agent Intellect.
Fans who live to dissect song lyrics aren’t exactly surprised that Joe Casey, the gravel-voiced frontman of Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr, is no fan of the soon-to-be-completed Detroit Events Center — future home of the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings! — or the Little Caesars Pizza CEOs who somehow convinced the taxpayers of the downtrodden Motor City to front the majority of the $627 million price tag.
The references are all over Protomartyr’s latest single, “Dope Cloud,” which is anything but a woozy paean to a stoner’s paradise: Catch the sneering nods to “the spoils of the pizza king,” the “largesse of the Lombard Bank” and the “halls of gold.”
“Everybody’s like, ‘It’s gonna save Detroit,’” says Casey, speaking by phone recently from New Orleans as the band prepped to head west to Houston for the front leg of its current tour. Protomartyr plays the Frequency on March 13, the final show before the band hits the SXSW festival in Austin. And even though Casey reveals that the song was actually inspired by a scene near the end of a 1940s-era movie — The Song of Bernadette, of all things — the chorus has the, um, blunt answer to the citizens of his native city: That’s not gonna save you, man.
The songs on The Agent Intellect, Protomartyr’s third album in as many years, are jam-packed with razor-sharp insights like these. The key is deploying the aural persistence to savor them through the relentless, driving grind of the band’s guitars and Casey’s full-throated delivery. Particularly when the band plays live.
“I mumble enough during a show that you generally hear what you wanna hear,” Casey jokes.
Casey turns serious, however, when he talks about how the band’s current album — a punk-soaked mix of the philosophical, the observational and the spiritual — came together.
“Our guitar player [Greg Ahee] came up with different parts that melded into each other,” says Casey. “I thought, well, maybe we should connect them lyrically. The lyrics always come second to the music. You never know when your last record’s gonna be. Usually, I’m just trying to figure out what works, and I thought maybe I could sneak in more personal stuff.”
Boy, did he ever. The personal/regional thread is unmistakable, from cynical childhood memories of the pope’s historic visit to the Silverdome (“Pontiac 87”) to the deeply affecting “Ellen,” a song written about Casey’s mother, who recently slipped into Alzheimer’s disease, from the perspective of his late father who, in an echo of current events in Flint, just happened to work for the Detroit water department.
“I’m not an expert on many things, but I lived my whole life in Detroit,” says Casey of his troubled town. “I like talking about it in songs. I don’t have a prescription to fix any of it — I’m just spouting things.”
Looks like understatement might be another of Casey’s lyrical talents.
