#agent intellect

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Jiwa Setelah Kematian: Perspektif Intelektual Al-Fārābī

Surau.co. Jiwa setelah kematian: perspektif intelektual Al-Fārābī menghadirkan pemikiran yang menarik tentang kesinambungan kesadaran dan peran akal dalam memahami eksistensi manusia. Dalam Risāla fī al-Nafs, Al-Fārābī menjelaskan bagaimana jiwa tidak sekadar hilang ketika tubuh mati, tetapi tetap memiliki kesinambungan melalui pengaruh intelektualnya terhadap alam dan masyarakat. Fenomena…

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Agent Intellect: Pilar Pengetahuan dan Akal dalam Tradisi Al-Fārābī

Surau.co. Agent Intellect atau Akal Penggerak menjadi salah satu konsep sentral dalam tradisi filsafat Islam klasik yang dikembangkan Al-Fārābī melalui Risāla fī al-Nafs. Konsep ini menekankan bahwa akal bukan sekadar alat berpikir, melainkan medium yang memungkinkan manusia memperoleh pengetahuan, mengolah informasi, sekaligus bertindak bijaksana dalam kehidupan. Peran utamanya terletak pada…

Agent Intellect: Pilar Pengetahuan dan Akal dalam Tradisi Al-Fārābī

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The Agent Intellect by Protomartyr, 2015

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An Indie Pop Retrospective on 2015

An Indie Pop Retrospective on 2015

A year is a long time. In it, there are 52 official days of album releases, plus the multitude of albums that come out of nowhere and mixtapes. While I am writing this piece, I realise that what I listened to at the start of the year nowhere matches up to what I am listening to by the end. On the one hand, it means that it’s mighty difficult for a single album to stick in my consciousness for a…

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Protomartyr — The Agent Intellect (Hardly Art)

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. 

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. 

Michael T. Fournier