★★★★★
Whether the cunning realisation of unquenchable creative vision or restlessness captured and let loose for the sake of it, releasing three studio albums in as many years can be thorny territory for even the most potent and strong-willed artist. With the release of their third album, The Agent Intellect, Detroit post-punk foursome Protomartyr edge towards the former, despite straddling a precarious line between resolve and reiteration that comes as standard in the seemingly unwinnable Sisyphean...
- thequietus.com
2015-11-11
★★★★★
In what feels like an odd moment of prescience, roughly halfway through The Agent Intellect, the harrowing third album from the Detroit band Protomartyr, the Pope pays a visit. It's 1987 in Pontiac, Mich., and Pope John Paul II is visiting the Silverdome, delivering Mass to the 100,000 faithful who'd come to hear him speak. Among them was a young Joe Casey who, 25 years later, would grow up to become Protomartyr's frontman...
- pitchfork.com
2015-10-07
★★★★★
This Detroit band's third album is another stellar set of bleak post-punk with angular guitars, taut, driving rhythms, gloomy vocals and acerbic lyrics. 10/2/2015
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- kexp.org
2015-10-03
★★★★★
Of the many reasons that postpunkers Protomartyr have struck a (dis)chord - a frontman who felt too old to start a band but did anyway, a downcast urgency that underlines his foreboding storytelling - their Detroit birthplace has proved compelling inspiration. Their music reflects dilapidated houses and demolition sites; it comes from a place of alluring urban decay and authentic economic hardship...
- www.theguardian.com
2015-10-02
★★★★★
Detroit's Protomartyr have released two albums of desolate post punk in the past two years. The year they took between releases saw them grow from releasing fuzzy, angular songs to making the atmospheric tunes found on their excellent second album, Under Color of Official Right. "Blues Festival," their contribution to this split, finds them following that same path. No Protomartyr song would be complete without Joe Casey's sardonic lyrics and this cut's got them in spades...
- www.punknews.org
2015-08-05
★★★★★
The term "post-punk" has perhaps become one of the most versatile, and perhaps overused, terms in modern music. But this is not meant as a slight - what might seem overwhelming has also been a welcome mat for some of the most inventive and enjoyable music in the medium. Protomartyr is one such band to find a home in these cracks, and Under Color of Official Right typifies the type of sound and emotion that fits into this non-genre...
- www.adequacy.net
2014-07-08
★★★★★
Attitude is hardly everything for Protomartyr, but as with any punkish band worth its salt, the up-and-coming Detroit quartet has forged its own identity by combining style and substance. While the band's rabble-rousing indie sound pieces together shards of the Fall, Gang of Four, and Mission of Burma, it's something more intangible about Protomartyr that prompts you to trace its lineage back to these spiritual forefathers, an agit-rock charisma you either have or you don't...
- www.popmatters.com
2014-06-05
★★★★★
Can cagey post-punk and ringing indie pop melodies share an unholy union? Of course they can. With workmanlike focus and shadowy charm, Detroit band Protomartyr's Under Color of Official Right, the follow-up to 2012 debut No Passion All Technique, chastises you for asking the question.
Protomartyr takes you to task in the gruff, sometimes comically severe voice of frontman Joe Casey, whose alternately sing-songy and yelping vocalizations lend Under Color much of its stylistic weight...
- consequenceofsound.net
2014-05-31
★★★★★
ProtomartyrUnder Color of Official Right (Hardly Art) In the dark rut between technological triumphalism and a working class on the ropes, the time is ripe for Protomartyr's axiomatic post-punk. Encrypted menace, lonely tremolo, and herky-jerk rhythms abound on the Detroit quartet's second album. Joe Casey's vocals recall the dour, embittered bellow of Mark E. Smith under the influence of domestic everyman spirits...
- www.austinchronicle.com
2014-05-24
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