We had the Hotel California from The Eagles in the ’70s, but now we have check-in at Hotel Usona, and this hotel is full of more than dread. Protomartyr’s seventh full-length finds the Detroit post-punk outfit reckoning with the horrors of our current world by building a place rather than just writing a record: a grand old hotel in a country that continues to get worse and worse.
Protomartyr’s music has always felt off-filter, seasick with distortion, but now, with the introduction of a horn section, it makes the tracks on Hotel Usona even more unyielding. There’s this spaghetti western dark desert vibe on tracks like “The Old Hotel” and “Converts.” The guitar work is just as strange as ever, mixing backwards loops and wandering fuzz.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Joe Casey’s deadpan vocal style, the baritone of a weary man who loves singing about his own apocalypse, but it really seems to work throughout Hotel Usona. Even though he does wax a bit too poetic and pretentious for my liking (a bit too much of wanting to be Nick Cave), the instrumental atmosphere on tracks like “The Knife Dream” keeps me coming back. Casey opts for a calmer vocal style than on albums like the previous Formal Growth in the Desert, and it makes Hotel Usona all the more unsettling.
