Titus Andronicus – The Monitor – 2010
Okay, this album is a couple years old, but they’ve got a new one coming out and I thought, given that I just blasted through the Japandroids latest and, well, my ears don’t hurt yet, I thought it would be a good time to back to TA.
Not since The Gaslight Anthem (Or Arcade Fire. Or John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band) has there been a band that has been as explicit of its love of Springsteen as Titus Andronicus. But, if that means you are expecting heartland music about the downtrodden or deserving, you won’t get that here.
Part Civil War reflection piece, part Americana, part punk, part rock operas, The Monitor is impossible to pigeon hole. The opening track, A More Perfect Union, is a kitchen sink of chaos. But it’s really the next track that Titus Andronicus show their true colors.
They are an anthem band for the 21st Century. Bookending the anthem with quotes (most notably, Lincoln’s “most miserable man living” at the end) they aren’t writing anthems for stadiums. These are intimate, difficult, small venue anthems. Titus Andronicus want you to hurt the way we all do when we are wronged. they want you to feel the blood on the battlefield on the mid-1800s.
Or that’s just what I am putting on them. But, deep in the chaos and dischord are some beefy and powerful hooks. I imagine a sea of Jersey kids jumping up and down, fists in the air, chanting, “you will always be a loser” at the end of “No Future Part 3: Escape from No Future, which, on the album, uses that momentum to take us into a marching band, parade snare gigantor of a track, Richard II or Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Responsible Hate Anthem). If this 2/4 Irish jig on steroids doesn’t get the crowd going, I dont want to know what would.
The album seems to reach its nadir of despair on “Four Score and Twenty”, a song of hopelessness and desperation as I’ve ever heard. But the band knows well enough that there’s no currency in pure hopelessness. So, the second half of this 8 minute centerpiece roils up like The Pogues challenged to a fistfight and declares itself “Born to die just like a man”. It’s ultimately a heroic piece, if even for the ultimate conclusion of much of the civil war, these men were NOTHING if not brave in the face of certain death.
Whew.
Fortunately that’s only followed by the most Replacement-like paen to blind stinking drunkenness, “Theme from ‘Cheers'” which has nothing to do with the actual theme from “Cheers” and more from the “Theme” of what happens in a bar. I.e. getting vomit inducing drunk.
The capstone to the record is the 14 minute (yes, you read that right) “The Battle of Hampton Roads” which is elliptically set against the epic battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack but is really a confessional for the singer who is rebelling against….well…everything. And finally pleas with his “darling” to never leave him, for he’d be nothing without…her? Or is it the war? Or is it the society he needs to rebel against?
I don’t know. I don’t think Patrick Stickles, the singer, does either. It doesn’t matter. It SHOULD be unresolved as the famous battle wasn’t decidedly won by either side.
The Monitor isn’t an easy album. It’s demanding. If you give yourself over to it, it’s like discovering Neutral Milk Hotel for the first time. Only edgier and angrier with a LOT more feedback. This band could be called Feedback. Or Funeral. Or Funny Funereal Feedback.
But, when you do give yourself to Titus Andronicus, be prepare to rock out like you’ve never done before.
Grade: A
ASide: A More Perfect Union, No Future Part 3: Escape from No Future
BlindSide: Richard II or Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (Responsible Hate Anthem), Theme From “Cheers”, The Battle of Hampton Roads
