The Agent Intellect

The album (and the Detroit quartet's career so far) peaks near the end with two brilliant songs, in which the humanity that underpins this bleak, bracing music finally becomes undeniable.

While the individual songs have peaks and purpose, the album winds up functioning on the same level.

The Agent Intellect is an impressive addition to the band’s small discography, and it hints that bigger, bolder work may lay ahead.

If Right was about the evil that men do, Intellect goes one bigger and asks why they do it. The answer, again and again, is rooted in hurt, pain, neglect, and disappointment. Intellect draws its energy from the panic of mortality.

The songs on The Agent Intellect are fuller, longer, and more meaningful. [Nov-Dec 2015, p.74]

The Agent Intellect probably isn't a record to be throwing on every evening after (or indeed without) work. Distilling the sheer fallibility of the human condition across twelve insistent tracks, each full listen feels like an investment in the slow-burning revelation of some bigger picture, delivered with the ardent persuasion of a band fully able to defend wasting no time in capturing the magic.

It starts with a slow drip and builds to a raging flood. It’s irresistible and so eloquently convincing that despite their claims of failure, Protomartyr are unstoppable.

Rather than back down from the precipice of decline and confusion, Protomartyr has reported the situation as they see it in The Agent Intellect, an uncomfortable, honest and ultimately excellent record.

The Agent Intellect is an album that challenges both the mind and the body; if you're looking for further confirmation that Protomartyr are one of the smartest and toughest bands of their day, this album is what you need.

If these guys don't have the loftiest ambitions ever, it needn't matter when The Agent Intellect makes post-punk feel like purest rock'n'roll.

Protomartyr save their best for the final half of the album beginning with the buzz saw, fuzz chug of “The Hermit”, moving into the splashy moroseness of “Clandestine Time” and recent single “Why Does It Shake?”. But it is on “Ellen” when The Agent Intellect truly peaks.

The Agent Intellect is a multi-layered, emotive powerhouse of a record.

Their third and best full-length.

Protomartyr is from Detroit, and there’s a dour, industrial affect to this record-- the band’s best, though like the others it can sometimes feel like one long song--which seems to confirm everything you think you know about that city.... But Mr. Casey’s excellent lyrics go bigger and more abstract.

The follow-up reins in some of the chaos and the songs are stronger for it. [Nov 2015, p.115]

Few of the album’s 11 ensuing tracks are quite as barnstorming as “Devil,” but the album remains gigantic throughout.

This isn’t spiky postpunk like their last album--it’s more unhinged: they’ve swapped hooks for a dirgy epicness, distortion bulldozes through, sometimes flaring angrily, punctured by driving, truly affecting drums. As poignant as those images of a decrepit Motor City, once brilliant, now decayed.

On The Agent Intellect, Casey finds himself as more of a vocal stylist than a singer, and that’s good.