Album Review: Titus Andronicus - The Monitor
- Written by Patrick Whyte
Two figures exert a substantial influence over Titus Andronicus’s second album The Monitor. The obvious one is Bruce Springsteen – America’s most famous chronicler of longing and automatic godfather to all New Jersey Bands. A nod to The Boss comes in the first verse of the opening track ‘A More Perfect Union’, when lead singer Patrick Stickles rasps “Because tramps like us, baby, we were born to die”.
Springsteen is there, but you almost feel inconveniently so, as if the band can’t quite figure out his place in their history. Far more interesting is the influence of the other figure - Abraham Lincoln the 16th President of the United States. Lincoln’s impact ranges from the obvious: he was President during the US Civil war, to the more obscure: Stickles has admitted to being influenced by Lincoln’s rhetorical techniques.
Prior to its release the hype that The Monitor generated largely came from the view that it was a concept album, which I suppose it is, but not in a ‘70s bloated prog-rock kind of way. The band use the idea of a long-ago war as a motif to frame the wars that rage inside the album’s protagonists: love vs hate, old vs new etc.
Throughout the album there are frequent allusions to conflict, both internal and external. Amid hurtling guitars and staccato drums ‘Richard II’ eloquently describes how collectively people can do hideous things to one another using mob mentality as an excuse, but actually the crimes you commit are “Nobody’s fault but your own”.
On ‘Four Score and Seven’ Stickles wearily tells us that “This is a war we can’t win/After ten thousand years it’s still us against them”. All appears futile until the brass section fades out and the guitar kicks in, the blood starts to pump and Stickles issues a rallying cry “I’m depraved and disgusting, I spew like a fountain/I’ve been debased, defaced, disgraced and destroyed”. It’s a song as epic as ‘Jungleland’ and as affecting as ‘Atlantic City’.
However, it’s not always as deep as this and the band have the ability to switch focus from the macro to the micro without it feeling contrived. ‘Theme from “Cheers”’ is an old-fashioned Replacements-esque homage to a local boozer, with Stickles’s sounding uncannily like Conor Oberst as the violins play in the background and the guitars create a folksy atmosphere. The only song that doesn’t quite feel right is ‘To Old Friends and New’, a country-tinged duet Wye Oak’s Jenn Wassner that feels almost like an after-thought used to break-up the album and check its speed.
It’s fitting that both Bruce and Abe should feature in the album’s last word ‘The Battle of Hampton Roads’. Springsteen gets a name check in an admission that you can’t really escape your past and an extract from Lincoln’s first inaugural address is quoted at the start. At over 14 minutes long it is a little self-indulgent but you can’t help but get swept along as the song rises and falls like a ship on the ocean before erupting into a cacophony of bagpipes and guitars.
While it’s certainly not flawless The Monitor is a magnificent achievement for two reasons: firstly it manages to cover universal themes yet somehow stays intensely personal and secondly it flat-out rocks.