LP - Black Vinyl Repress.
Fantastic and one of the albums of 2015. The Agent Intellect is Protomartyr's third and finest work to date. Named after an ancient philosophical questioning of how the mind operates in relation to the self, it's an elegant and often devastating display of all that makes Protomartyr so vital and singularly visceral an outfit. Over the course of several months, Greg Ahee waded through more than a hundred song fragments until he reached the bottomless melodies of I Forgive You and Clandestine Time, the inky depths of Pontiac '87 and titanic churn of Why Does It Shake?. Lyrically, Casey is at his most confident and haunting. He humanizes evil on The Devil in His Youth, and, amid the charred pop of Dope Cloud, he reassures us that nothing - not God, not money - can or will prevent our minds from unraveling until we finally fade away. We are no one and nothing, he claims, without our thoughts. It's a theme that echoes through the entirety of the record, but never as beautifully as it does on Ellen. Named after his mother and written from the perspective of his late father, it's as romantic a song as you're likely to hear this or any year, Casey promising to wait for her on the other side, with the memories she's lost safely in hand. For fans of The Fall, Interpol and Total Control.
Tracklist:
A1. The Devil In His Youth
A2. Cowards Starve
A3. I Forgive You
A4. Boyce Or Boice
A5. Pontiac 87
A6. Uncle Mother's
B1. Dope Cloud
B2. The Hermit
B3. Clandestine Time
B4. Why Does It Shake
B5. Ellen
B6. Feast Of Stephen