Let’s face it: the industry expectation is that rock
music is for, by, and about young’uns. Protomartyr bucks these expectations.
Singer Joe Casey is dealing with the unsexy reality of losing parents, the long
look down the decline slope of what
comes after age 40. Sonic precedents abound: it’s easy to hear traces of the
Fall, Joy Division, Girls Against Boys, but The
Agent Intellect is not retro. Rather, the record exists in and ruminates on
the now, be it under the well-heeled dystopian umbrella of technology, or,
alternately, the crushing mundanity of loss. The weight of this jumbled present
is overwhelming, occasionally contradictory and senseless. 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.
Whether he’s teaching punk rock history at Tufts, lovingly teasing out the
deets of the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime, or weaving an equal
parts elegant and gritty tale of New Hampshire have-nots attempting to
transcend circumstance in his lovely, affecting Swing State, Michael T.
Fournier brings the heavy to his work.
The rising novelist/critic took the hardcore meta to another level with his
2011 novel Hidden Wheel, however, taking the 80 punk rock band from page to
stage.
“Hidden Wheel was first: parts of it are loosely based on ten years of
living in Boston,” he tells Decibel. “I was thinking about the Singularity
a lot at the time, and wanted to use the digital vs. analogue argument as a
plot point, so I had a solar flare erase all the world’s hard drives,
making vinyl win – again. I was in grad school at the time, reading
Bahktin, Faulkner, and Nabakov, so there are elements of each – tons of
anagramming, and polyphony/multiple narrative viewpoints.
"Dead Trend started with me walking around the house humming all these
stupid hardcore songs I made up for the book. I already had enough guitar
to write hardcore songs and learned how to play drums when I was in grad
school at UMaine, so I thought it would be fun to try and play 80’s style
hardcore with friends. I recruited some dudes form up there – two-thirds
of Great Western Plain and my 21-year-old boss from WMEB – and we started
playing. It’s a lot of fun. Our tenth show was opening for Mike Watt’s book
release in NYC at Le Poisson Rouge, which was a highlight.”
Check it out for yourself here:
Bad Policy EP
by Dead Trend
Follow Fournier via Facebook, Twitter, and his own official site. Check out
the Boston Globe on Dead Trend. And here’s the man himself on the
aforementioned Swing State…
“Swing State was originally a light-hearted reflection on living up in
Orono – I intended it to be in the John Irving/Richard Russo arena,” he
says. “After I toured Hidden Wheel, in 2012, I made an effort to make the
new stuff easier for me to read out loud – I did my own ‘HW’ audiobook and
read in around 20 cities, and trust me, reading a character whose dialogue
is unpunctuated rapid fire was no picnic. With that said, I worked Upward
Bound at UMaine for a few summers. The students in the program had – and
have – so much adversity to get through, which bled into the writing: one
of the main characters lives in a Coover-ish fantasy world where he hosts
his own game show; another tries to escape by stealing iPads and whatnot
from cars. The tone of the book was also influenced by the death of my
mother-in-law, who was diagnosed with cancer in October 2011 and died a few
days before Christmas the same year."
For ten years, Screaming Females have been bringing their specific brand of three-piece punk shred to basements all over the world. It’s jarring, then, that on their new long player Rose Mountain, the veneer of scuzz that coated their past
recordings has been stripped clean in favor of a more produced, metal-sounding
attack. Punk purists may remember the final Jawbreaker album, which was loudly
and widely decried as a sellout (until revisionist history changed its mind
years later). Worry not, for this is not
your father’s devisive Dear You.
On You’re Better Than This, Boston’s Pile builds on the heavy, thorny foundation laid down after extensive touring and the 2012 long-player Dripping. But unlike some of their heavy contemporaries, the band’s
song structures rely on their own internal logic, often eschewing easy
structures and easy answers as each new part builds on the last rather than
relying on simple verses and choruses.
