The Future Is a Cruelty

This is the dawning of the day without end...

Comparisons between Protomartyr and the Fall are so commonplace they’re almost trite. Almost, but not quite. Joe Casey inhabits a great many of the musico-poetic roles that listeners loved in Mark E. Smith: sarcastic ambivalence that could unexpectedly give way to sincerity, a talent for the vivid grotesque, the aura of a madman carnival barker harnessing the existential circus.

Some have said Ultimate Success Today, released in July, is the most Fall-esque of Protomartyr's albums, and there's something to this. Smith was very good at narrating from the point of view of the inhuman. Casey has a similar talent, seemingly granting impersonal forces a will of their own that invisibly jerk us around at their whim. Urban decline, immigration detention centers, extreme alienation, greed, preventable death – these aren’t just subject matter on Ultimate Success Today. They are, in many ways, the actual narrators. And they have things to tell us that are equal parts harrowing and compelling. An…