Man, it's been a busy week. I'm working to get the blog up to at least two, ideally three posts a week, but with finals, working overtime, desperate apartment hunting, and the necessity of sleep, it's been a struggle to get even one out this week.
Add to it the fact that I've undertaken the new Titus Andronicus record to review which is a 29-track (no, for real, look at that track list down below), 5-act, 93 minute rock opera and I'm thinking maybe I've bitten off more than I can chew as a novice music reviewer? The problem is this record, The Most Lamentable Tragedy, is so memorable and so enjoyable, easily one of my favorites of the year, that I would hardly pass up the opportunity to review it.
Titus Andronicus are a group of musicians from Glen Rock, NJ, who have made a huge splash in the world of independent music with their incredibly unique and raw blend of Americana, lo-fi indie rock, classic rock, and straight-up, in-your-face punk. In 2010, they had a big breakout with their sophomore album, The Monitor, which is well known for its Civil War themes and simultaneously triumphant and cynical anthems for the disillusioned. The album is widely hailed as their best and the measuring stick for their subsequent albums.
After a somewhat unambitious and laid back third album, Titus Andronicus (or +@, as they like to be called lately) have pulled out all the stops on this their fourth album and have created, as you might guess from the length of it, their most ambitious and grandiose album to date.
The Most Lamentable Tragedy is masterminded by the charismatic Harvard graduate of a frontman, Patrick Stickles, as all +@ releases have been, and it follows the story of his (or "Our Hero's") battle with manic depression. It's a true rock opera in the most classic, The Who-inspired way, with a dizzying roller coast of dynamics, a feverish web of self-references, and a "punk" band hopping genres as fast as any progressive band could do on their concept albums. There's a 39 second hardcore punk track, a 9 minute Celtic rock inspired anthem, a Daniel Johnston cover, a Pogues cover, an intermission, and the kitchen sink. Unifying it all are Stickles' raw and earnest vocals, delivering his story with such desperation and vinegar in his throat that it's hard to look away.
Over the years, we've seen quite a bit of Stickles' sharp, cynical mind at work, especially as far as lyrics go. I mean, again, the guy wrote The Monitor which seamlessly combined quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Simon & Garfunkel alike while delivering memorable one-liners like "Will I not yell like hell for the glory of the Newark Bears?" or, definitive of his sharp cynicism, "I will not deny my humanity, I'll be rolling in it like a pig in feces."
Here, however, on surface level, Stickles' narrative of depression, which in fact was a major theme of The Monitor, is told with deliberate oversimplification. Like "I'm Going Insane (Finish Him)" whose only lyrics are "I'm going insane." Or "I Lost My Mind (+@ )" in which every single line of the 4:18 song ends with a word that rhymes with "mind." The opening verse features the lines:
"No it feels just fine when I lose my mind
And it looks so nice when it's flying right by
Now I don't mind when I lose my mind
My whole life I've been losing my mind."
However, true to +@'s style, they reward the listener who digs deeper than the surface value. Listen past that first verse of "I Lost My Mind," and you'll find the verse where he finds his mind in a corner with his eyes real wide, and after talking with him about coming back to him, they "hugged, high-fived, and stayed up all night." "I'm Going Insane" is itself a reference to, if not a refrain of, "Titus Andronicus vs. The Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)." And speaking of references, which have always been half of the fun of deciphering Stickles' wonderfully ugly voice, they come much more subtly on this album and mostly are self-referential. Stickles himself annotated the lyrics to songs like "Dimed Out" and "Come On, Siobhan" on Genius.com and it's sort of astounding how many lines tie into other tracks on the album. Then there's the obvious self-references like the continuation of the "No Future" songs and "A More Perfect Union." Even the album title itself nods to the band name itself!
Essentially, Stickles' lyrics, in their simultaneous simplification and tangle, serve as the much needed web of stability to this... well, manic and depressive album's dynamic range of music. Like the lyrics, The Most Lamentable Tragedy's songs are compositionally stripped back from the epics seen on The Monitor. Each song, or string of songs sometimes, its own self contained musical world, but they holistically contribute to each of the five "acts" as a self contained musical galaxy (which contributes to the story of the whole album).
For instance, Act IV: The Other Side or A Midsummer Night's Dream takes us from the bright, almost pop-y "Come On, Siobhan," to the Pogues cover "A Pair of Brown Eyes" to the Old English cover "Auld Lang Syne" to the dark punk almost-Titus Andronicus-cover "I'm Going Insane." And yet the whole Act IV is part of a "past-life regression / dream sequence ... with his own ancestor as his avatar."
Sometimes these worlds and galaxies align spectacularly, like the fantastic run from "Mr. E. Mann" to my absolute album favorite "Dimed Out." Sometimes, though, they flop, like Act V which features mediocre songs, one gem, and the absolute album worst "Stable Boy.
I think it's becoming apparent how impossible it is to describe everything that's going on here in a review that's a digestible length. I also think it's becoming apparent how much fun this record is to listen to. It's like taking a trip into the dusty basement of Stickles' mind where we see old elementary school photos, high school graduation caps, crates of empty pill bottles, +@ memorabilia from The Airing of Grievances era, an old rocking chair from his Irish grandmother, a piano in disrepair, a pile of rat poop, boxes of LPs, and a single light shining in the attic.
If The Monitor was Titus Andronicus' crown, then they have their throne in The Most Lamentable Tragedy upon which they survey all that is theirs. If this isn't their magnum opus, I'm excited to see what's coming next. If they have written their magnum opus here, well, it's a knotted, ugly, grimy mess, but could there be a more fitting way for them to have their masterpiece?
| OVERALL SCORE: 8.8 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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