You can read through coverage of Protomartyr’s past albums and you’ll see thematic references which meet expectations – unabated anger, nightmarish visions, awful truth – the kind of stimuli the band’s singer Joe Casey and guitarist Greg Ahee have been unrepentant in channeling. To their credit this pushing back against the erosion of what was left of America’s dream has made them one of the country’s alternative national treasures, but still, this shit is real.
Between this, the band’s seventh album and it’s predecessor Formal Growth In The Desert both Casey and drummer Alex Leonard have become fathers, a complication that implies a different perspective on coping and caring about a nation that’s become one big upside down. Left to craft demos on his own, Ahee began to draw on elements which were not previously in the band’s musical arc – brass, strings, piano – in the process creating a new construct into which Casey poured in demons both real and spectral. Imagining the meta as a seedy place for these nightmares to live in, the idea of Hotel Usona was born.
There was one preview that promised familiarity in the nasty, AI slaying Fee The Sewer, but the record’s main body is far more reliant on atmospheres than in the band’s past. Opener The Old Hotel pitches Casey as raconteur amongst the decay, the rolling drums and reverb more in the guise of say The National, whilst on The Knife Dream he throws scalding water over toxic masculinity like a Michigan Nick Cave. The gilded post rock of Sounds We Cannot Hear and eight minute closer Checking Out are even more alien, but it’s the trumpet’s call of Converts that best articulates what for Protomartyr the quantum leap forward Hotel Usona is. If you listen to any of their records, make it this one.
You can read a full review here.
