Intellect is immediately more of a bummer than the band’s previous album Under Color of Official Right, and less immediately catchy. The new salvo begins with a another mass killing. “The Devil In His Youth” focuses in on a suburban teen, living an average life until, shunned by peers, he decides to inflict his pain on the world. “You will feel the way I do/you will hurt the way I do,” Casey intones, recalling the misanthropic narration Steve Albini was so fond of in Big Black. The subject matter should be shocking, but such events happen every day. We’re dulled to it, prepped for it.

Casey is at his jumbled, Mark E. Smith-y best in “I Forgive You,” with gloomy synth underscoring the paranoid proceedings — an unnamed “they” “know our movements, own our failures.” There’s no solution being proposed, not even so much a finger pointed at a specific shadow, just an insistent and stifling claustrophobia which only intensifies with the wisdom of age. Maybe change is only so many bells and whistles. Or maybe “they” are onto something. 

To make the record sound entirely gloomy is unfair and untrue: Intellect’s effectiveness is grounded in juxtaposition. “Dope Cloud” recalls Don DeLillo’s White Noise as the Airborne Toxic Event that descends and envelops Casey’s town “is blowing gold dust to the pockets of the undeserved.” Solution after solution is proposed and summarily shot down to a refrain (not a chorus) of “not gonna save you, man,” the kind of lyric which hardly sounds poppy but inevitably gets stuck in one’s craw for days afterwards.  Similarly catchy is the end chant of “Pontiac 87,” a song which highlights drummer Alex Leonard’s tom-heavy style. So spare is he with brass that cymbal hits gain new relevance. Positively bubbly guitar bounces over a tale of shady doings at the Silverdome before Casey chants “There’s no use in being sad about it/what’s the point in crying about it” past the breaking point. 

End song “Feast of Stephen” sums things up succinctly with “it seems so stupid, yeah!” And indeed, this unglamorous, aging life does seems that way, what with its fears, possibly baseless, occasionally visceral and heartbreaking as in “Why Does It Shake,” Kelly’s chronicle of his mother’s descent into Alzhemier’s. We can wallow in the unfairness of it all, but why? There’s no point. We can inflict, or, alternately, attempt to communicate it all, explain, find kind ears and hearts. Protomartyr, with vulnerable honesty, have done just that.