Post-punk Protomartyr will perform Friday at Stickyz

"Pontiac 87," the fifth track from Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr's excellent 2015 album The Agent Intellect, may be the best (and only?) rock song about Pope John Paul II's 1987 visit to the Pontiac Silverdome.

Singer-songwriter Joe Casey was there, but his take from the event had more to do with the crowd than the pontiff.

"Afterwards, a riot broke/old folks turned brutish/trampling their way out the gates/toward heaven," he sings-speaks in a curiously appealing flat drone that has invited about 1,000 comparisons to British art punks The Fall and the doomed genius of Joy Division.

The band -- Casey, drummer Alex Leonard, guitarist Greg Ahee, bassist Scott Davidson -- plays Friday at Stickyz Rock 'n' Roll Chicken Shack with the Gotobeds of Pittsburgh and local group Bombay Harambee opening.

Formed in 2008 in Detroit, Protomartyr released its debut, No Passion, All Technique, in 2012. Under Color of Official Light followed in 2014.

Their sound is angular and jagged, acknowledging post-punk forebears like Mission of Burma and Wire while at the same time mixing traces of '80s New Wave and pop with the raw thump of Detroit legends like The Stooges. Yes, Casey's lyrics often tend to be bleak ("Why Does It Shake?" is about his mother's fight with Alzheimer's), but he's not all gloom and doom.

"I just wasn't hacking it as a brain surgeon," he writes in an email on why, at 32 and with no musical experience, he started the band with Ahee and Leonard. "One night after yet another difficult surgery, I found myself staring at my hands. They appear alien to me, these extensions of myself that powered me to the upper echelons of my chosen field. 'These hands, they are not truly surgeon's hands,' I thought."

Stand back. Casey's on a roll now.

"That very same night I left my beautiful wife and three ugly kids and never looked back. Now those hands deftly wrap themselves around a hot microphone every night."

Actually, he was working the door at a Ferndale, Mich., comedy club called Go! Comedy when Protomartyr got started.

"It would probably have been nothing but boredom that made me want to be in a band," Casey concedes. "That and the promise of free beer and hummus for the rest of my life."

He casts an unlikely figure as a frontman, barely moving while the band sways behind him, eyes often hidden behind dark glasses. There's a strange charisma to this, though; he looks like a jazz-loving high school teacher waiting for a bus.

Casey and his band mates were in their beloved Detroit early last month, rehearsing. So, how are things in the Motor City?

"Just fine," he writes. "The Tigers botched their playoff run, the Lions are dependably garbage and the Red Wings look shaky this year. Life potters along."

Before the American leg of their current tour began in Chicago on Wednesday, the group was in the United Kingdom for the third time this year. What are shows there like?

"The crowds drink different brands of beer, speak in a garbled tongue that sounds like animals rutting in a dark wood, and all dress like extras in a Shakespeare play," he jokes of the typical English throng at a Protomartyr gig. "Besides that, they are just like you or I."

Friday's Little Rock gig is the second time Protomartyr has been to Arkansas, and the first time went pretty well.

"We played Fayetteville on a Sunday during the summer a couple of years ago. The town was dead and we were dreading a lame show. But I've gone on record saying that night at [J.R.'s Pizzeria & Lightbulb Club] was one of my favorite shows ever and I stick by that assessment. Google it if you don't believe me."

(Done. In an interview at bostonhassle.com, Casey, when asked if there were any venues he'd enjoyed recently, said, "Oddly enough, the Lightbulb Club in Fayetteville, Ar., was great ....").

Weekend on 11/03/2016