Titus Andronicus lead singer Patrick Stickles was, if only for a moment, ever-so-slightly inclusive a few weeks ago, addressing the audience at the penultimate point during a crowd-decimating, six-man strong aural laceration in downtown Manhattan.
“This is a song about everyone but them,” he said, pointing to a raucous contingent of friends in the Knitting Factory audience, then adding “And all of you”—pause—”and us,” before topping off his band's headlining performance with one final chunk of fuck-the-world, cranked-amp, Us-vs.-Them bombast.
Stickles, understand, is not generally the type to include. so I naturally felt (temporarily) flattered. Titus' debut full-length, The Airing Of Grievances, is a deafening, nine-song exercise in existential blame and absurd anguish, Stickles chest-pounding with his left hand and finger-pointing with his right. Album opener “Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ” starts with the volume way down low, the singer's barely-audible warble admonishing the listener, asking, “How can love exist in a world full people like you?” then mercilessly tacking on an empathy-free: “I just pray you will not be spared.”
Grievances turns out to be a deci-bully, however, and as surely as I cranked the output to properly hear the album's first minute and 15 seconds, after a multi-tracked army screeched a loud-as-murder “Fuck you!” at me, I scrambled back to the volume nob; the intro is, at least sonically, a fake haven, with the remainder of the first cut's six minutes (and nearly the entire LP) freaking and peaking out in (un)cathartic assault.
It's no coincidence that New Jersey is name-checked in the title of the lead track, as Titus Andronicus hail from Glen Rock, another of New Jersey's plentiful blots, that one situated in the population-dense, Garden State metro-overlap to the immediate west of New York City.
And on the 45-minute Airing, Stickles makes a good case for being so vehemently—even suicidally—stifled by his surroundings. Suburban rage has often sounded laughable paired with a guitar, but Titus' songs effectively ponder the sour fruits of a 'burb education with its frustratingly futile inapplicability. Art, we herein learn, is what's taught in school, but art's most applicable point is life's hellish indifference (at best) and brutality (at worst). “I hope I never get my fill of pushing a boulder up on the hill,” Stickles moans, casting his lot with Sisyphus in a quarter-hearted search for optimism.
The band take their name from Shakespeare's (presumed) first and (inarguably) most violent play, a five-act bloody melée with an unabridged title that promises the theater-goer The Most Lamentable Tragedy Of Titus Andronicus. It is, in short, the Bard's largely derided and generally overlooked over-the-top tale of rape, murder and cannibalism.
Titus' tunes, which on record sound appealingly muddy—recorded as though the band had angrily surrounded the microphone in the far corner of a spacious room—often take inspiration from history's now-expired intellectuals. One song title name drops both a painting, "Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus,” and its creator, Pieter Brughel The Elder, a 1500's painter better known for bummed-out canvas exploits like “The Triumph Of Death.” Assuming you get the point by now, I'll save explaining the album's last song, a shimmering, over six-minute epic simply named (and do see the band live, if for no other reason than the chance to yell out a dead French philosopher's name between songs) “Albert Camus.”
None of this is to say that Titus Andronicus don't have a sense of humor. It may be the reflexive dabs of comedy, hard to initially discern but funny-as-hell when detected, that elevate the Titus boys to a more substantial weight-class than their high school poetry peers. Suicide meditation “No Future Part One” is immediately followed by its sister/sequel, the latter smirkingly dubbed “No Future Part Two: The Day After No Future.” It's funny, I like to think, because it's true.
Stickles uses these two cuts, built as almost all of Airing is out of major-key changes that verge on being church chords, to finally make the declaration that amusingly either ultimately heaps all the blame upon himself, or at least suggests the sheer unredressability of his situation.
“I am dying slowly,” he laments, “from Patrick Stickles Disease.”
Greg Burgett's music blog has no future at songsaboutknives.com
“This is a song about everyone but them,” he said, pointing to a raucous contingent of friends in the Knitting Factory audience, then adding “And all of you”—pause—”and us,” before topping off his band's headlining performance with one final chunk of fuck-the-world, cranked-amp, Us-vs.-Them bombast.
Stickles, understand, is not generally the type to include. so I naturally felt (temporarily) flattered. Titus' debut full-length, The Airing Of Grievances, is a deafening, nine-song exercise in existential blame and absurd anguish, Stickles chest-pounding with his left hand and finger-pointing with his right. Album opener “Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ” starts with the volume way down low, the singer's barely-audible warble admonishing the listener, asking, “How can love exist in a world full people like you?” then mercilessly tacking on an empathy-free: “I just pray you will not be spared.”
Grievances turns out to be a deci-bully, however, and as surely as I cranked the output to properly hear the album's first minute and 15 seconds, after a multi-tracked army screeched a loud-as-murder “Fuck you!” at me, I scrambled back to the volume nob; the intro is, at least sonically, a fake haven, with the remainder of the first cut's six minutes (and nearly the entire LP) freaking and peaking out in (un)cathartic assault.
It's no coincidence that New Jersey is name-checked in the title of the lead track, as Titus Andronicus hail from Glen Rock, another of New Jersey's plentiful blots, that one situated in the population-dense, Garden State metro-overlap to the immediate west of New York City.
And on the 45-minute Airing, Stickles makes a good case for being so vehemently—even suicidally—stifled by his surroundings. Suburban rage has often sounded laughable paired with a guitar, but Titus' songs effectively ponder the sour fruits of a 'burb education with its frustratingly futile inapplicability. Art, we herein learn, is what's taught in school, but art's most applicable point is life's hellish indifference (at best) and brutality (at worst). “I hope I never get my fill of pushing a boulder up on the hill,” Stickles moans, casting his lot with Sisyphus in a quarter-hearted search for optimism.
The band take their name from Shakespeare's (presumed) first and (inarguably) most violent play, a five-act bloody melée with an unabridged title that promises the theater-goer The Most Lamentable Tragedy Of Titus Andronicus. It is, in short, the Bard's largely derided and generally overlooked over-the-top tale of rape, murder and cannibalism.
Titus' tunes, which on record sound appealingly muddy—recorded as though the band had angrily surrounded the microphone in the far corner of a spacious room—often take inspiration from history's now-expired intellectuals. One song title name drops both a painting, "Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus,” and its creator, Pieter Brughel The Elder, a 1500's painter better known for bummed-out canvas exploits like “The Triumph Of Death.” Assuming you get the point by now, I'll save explaining the album's last song, a shimmering, over six-minute epic simply named (and do see the band live, if for no other reason than the chance to yell out a dead French philosopher's name between songs) “Albert Camus.”
None of this is to say that Titus Andronicus don't have a sense of humor. It may be the reflexive dabs of comedy, hard to initially discern but funny-as-hell when detected, that elevate the Titus boys to a more substantial weight-class than their high school poetry peers. Suicide meditation “No Future Part One” is immediately followed by its sister/sequel, the latter smirkingly dubbed “No Future Part Two: The Day After No Future.” It's funny, I like to think, because it's true.
Stickles uses these two cuts, built as almost all of Airing is out of major-key changes that verge on being church chords, to finally make the declaration that amusingly either ultimately heaps all the blame upon himself, or at least suggests the sheer unredressability of his situation.
“I am dying slowly,” he laments, “from Patrick Stickles Disease.”
Greg Burgett's music blog has no future at songsaboutknives.com
