Review by Simon Abrams: Jersey lo-fi indie-punks Titus Andronicus established themselves in 2008 as a group to watch with The Airing of Grievances, a heedlessly over-ambitious, emotionally destabilized and, to use a phrase from our illustrious editor Sam C. Mac, utterly pulverizing, unvarnished album. The Garden state band wore their punk and their Springsteen influences on their sleeves while haphazardly quoting Camus, Shakespeare and even Seinfeld, and for their inspired zeal, the album was recognized by Pitchfork as one of the best of its year. Titus Andronicus's raw and ragged aesthetic only grows more excessive with their follow-up, The Monitor, a concept album that makes frequent allusions to the Civil War, including a dramatized recording of a public address Lincoln gave in 1838 to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois. This distorted, tinny sampling kicks off “A Perfect Union,” the album’s opening track, and sets the tone for the conspiratorial, punch-drunk and rollicking album to follow. It ends not with a call to arms but a heedless charge towards self-destruction: “As a nation of free men, we shall live forever, or die by suicide.”

The quote is gratuitous, to say the least, but it shows you exactly who these guys are and why the album is such a glorious mess. In its own smart-ass way, it proclaims Titus Andronicus’s tendency to indulge their melancholic urges to howl at the world, treat everyone and everything as a threat (“The enemy is everywhere” is the incantatory refrain to the tellingly named second track, “Titus Andronicus Forever”) and go down swinging with an explosive sound and a swaggering, unfocussed musical virtuosity. If anything, Titus Andronicus’s sound has devolved since their first album, trading a rigid but effective focus of intent for a free-form tendency to slow to a halt at least twice per song so that they may shift gears and switch both tempo and tone just enough to periodically throw the listener for a loop. These guys don’t do technique, consistency or emotional modesty, but they do put on a heck of a display of percussive raw power.

The best way to describe The Monitor’s sound is in terms of periodic, intuitively timed swells. Lead singer/guitarist Patrick Stickles breathless, scratchy warble alternates between thrashing out epithets on tracks like the charging anthem “Richard II” and half-moaning, half-crooning morose declarations of self-loathing hyperbole, as on the undulating, predominantly shoegaze-inspired “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future.” The two styles butt heads on pretty much every track, with mixed results: “A Pot in Which to Piss” stalls three times before it really takes off while the hideously distended “The Battle for Hampton Roads” practically implodes but somehow just keeps going and going until it reaches a triumphal long-haul march lead by a bagpipe solo and followed through by sheer force of will on the part of the band’s outstanding drummer Eric Harm (this guy’s got stamina like nothing else and energy to spare). If the band’s songs conform to a loose pattern it’s that of building up their sulks and screams to the point where the two are indistinguishable.

The Monitor’s bigger sound doesn’t always make it better than The Airing of Grievances. It's certainly a more personal album, one that despairs at love lost and alienation only to rally around a pervasive feeling of emotional exhaustion and back again (“You will always be a loser” becomes a quasi-hardcore chant in “No Future Part Three” while “I’m at the end of my rope and I feel like swinging” cements “A Pot in Which to Piss's” status as one of the band’s most eminently quotable). But the album’s best tracks are still the ones that are at least formally more refined: the sing-along break-up duet “To Old Friends and New” is labored but soulful; and Harm pulls out all the stops during the final charge of “Four Score and Seven,” while Stickles showboats to maximum effect on his axe. Still, The Monitor proves that Titus Andronicus's “more is more” credo works: the record is splashy enough to be endlessly replayable and certainly ponderous enough to be both proudly crude and deeply satisfying.

Last Word: With their second album, Titus Andronicus have stopped trying to be so rigid in the way they structure their songs. As a result, they’ve fleshed out a much more loose and playfully bombastic sound of their own and produced a better work for it. Long may they live.

Review By:
Simon Abrams

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