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Talk about a road trip -- we feel travel fatigue just looking at the 17 states and a Canadian province that the four Detroiters in Protomartyr will hit by mid-March on a coast-to-coast concert tour.
Club bookings in major U.S. cities and European capitals during the next three months show these post-punkers have global appeal.
Frontman Joe Casey is backed by guitarist Greg Ahee, drummer Alex Leonard and bassist Scott Davidson. All four graduated from the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy, though not the same decade.
Joe Casey (second from left): "We’re still a band who can’t stay in a hotel room — we have to sleep on some floors." (Photo by Zak Bratto)
The hectic swing comes after a Friday show at Ann Arbor's Blind Pig and one a night later at Bell's Eccentric Cafe in Kalamazoo. They'll play 28 shows in less than six weeks, with just seven performance-free days. Stops include Brooklyn, Miami, New Orleans, Houston, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Minneapolis and a five-day finale at the South by Southwest festival in Austin.
Travel resumes in late March with a 16-day tour of 20 European cities in a dozen countries. That schedule includes clubs in Dubin, London, Amsterdam, Munich, Rome, Vinenna and Prague. They return to Europe in early June.
Before the 2016 whirlwind sweeps them far from Southeast Michigan, Casey answers questions from University of Michigan sophomore Regan Detwiler of The Michigan Daily.
The arts writer and editorial page co-editor, a literature major from Columbus, describes a sound that's "mellow yet explorative, but still angry." Detwiler says their October release, "The Agent Intellect," is "without a doubt their best, album in four years." (It's on CD and MP3 at Amazon and elsewhere.)
When the student journalist asks about "that raw sound that you guys have," Casey says:
Well, you know, you can live in a world where you listen to very smooth, perfectly constructed music and enjoy it. If you think music is kind of like visual art, some very raw things are still considered art. There are some things that are sculpted out of marble and took decades to make. And a world can exist where both of those things are going on. . . .
We want to sound better, but I guess we sound as good as we are. (Laughs.) The band is getting better, but we play at our level.
Here are more excerpts from Detwiler's "chat with the group's dark-humored and semi-fatalistic front man," as she puts it, and a NPR video from December.
► Tour budget: "We’re still a band who can’t stay in a hotel room — we have to sleep on some floors. . . . I don’t think there’ll be another album coming out this year."
► Change since 2011: "The first record, we recorded in a day. Now we have a whole week! We really wanted to kind of use the studio as much as possible."
► New album's reviews: "It’s always a good sign when people tell you it’s the best. . . . I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, I can take that bad review’ because I can’t. . . .You’re responding to it. So it’s good to see people are thinking that we’re developing or getting better or changing. "
