titus-andronicus-monitor-blog

[titus-andronicus-monitor-blog]

Titus Andronicus – The Monitor

I first heard Titus Andronicus in the summer of 2015, just a few weeks before my second year at UVA started.  They had just released their fourth album, The Most Lamentable Tragedy, and after hearing its praises across the Internet I decided to check it out.  It was…good.  I love TMLT now, but at first listen, I just heard a collection of solid 70s punk tunes with a crazed drunk lunatic on vocals and (by my then standards) lo-fi production.  I liked it well enough, but wasn’t exactly itching to jump back in.

I continued to look up the band, and everywhere I looked, the same whispers echoed from every corner of the web: “The Monitor, you need to hear The Monitor!”  So one night, while I was grinding away in Bloodborne, I decided to trade in my makeshift Chelsea Wolfe soundtrack and throw on The Monitor to see what the fuss was about.  From the opening, I was intrigued.  By the second track, I was hooked.  By the third track, I had shut off the PlayStation to give this album a proper listen in my room.  I knew it was going to be special.

 Rally Around the Flag

The moment The Monitor won me over was halfway through “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future,” when the band takes the line “You will always be a loser” and for two minutes build it into a massive punk album, capping it off with “AND THAT’S OKAAAAAYYYYYY!”  Military snare rolls, squealing guitars, and gang vocals build “No Future” into a punk anthem for the ages, and it’s still the purest catharsis I get from my music library today.  Self-loathing has never been so fun.

That “fun” factor is what initially drew me to The Monitor.  There’s certainly a dark underbelly beneath it all, and we’ll touch on that in a bit, but for my first listen, what captured me was how grand, frenetic, and energetic it all sounded.  Patrick Stickles and company could have written a straightforward punk album, but let’s take a look at all of those moments that set it apart:

When “A More Perfect Union turns into an army rally cry at 5:30

The entire second half of “No Future Part Three”

The piano flourish at 4:58 in “A Pot In Which To Piss” that turns the song into an old-school Springsteen jam, up until the horns that close it out

The “You won’t be laughing so hard” two minutes into “Four Score and Seven” that sounds like a Mumford & Sons chorus done right

At 2:20 in “Theme from ‘Cheers’” when the easy-going bar rock jam ramps up in tempo

The last minute of “To Old Friends and New” where everyone’s arm-in-arm chanting “It’s alright, the way that you live”

The E Street keyboard, saxophone, and drum solos thundering one after another in “…And Ever”

The bagpipe solo at 9:15 in “The Battle of Hampton Roads” followed by a rocking lo-fi guitar solo to close out the record

These moments are so exciting because they’re both unexpected and shake up the song’s structure.  Note how many of these happen midway through songs, and how they often mark a massive transition in the song.  In Selling Sounds, Suisman notes Irving Berlin’s nine rules for popular music, including “Your song must be perfectly simple” at number 8 (Suisman 45-46).  None of the above songs are simple in composition, and yet they’re the moments fans come back and talk about.  If a lack of simplicity keeps them out of the mainstream, it’s certainly what keeps them grounded in their cult following.

The band’s popularity can certainly be traced to its callbacks to the past.  Stickles isn’t shy that his music is indebted to Bruce Springsteen.  He gets name-dropped in the closer while the opener riffs on a lyric from “Born to Run”.  Elsewhere, there’s obviously the punk of the Pogues and the Replacements. The most interesting element, however, is the prominent use of military music.  The album is full of snare marches, especially the beat of “Richard II,” and the bagpipe solo in the closer sounds lifted out of a soldier’s funeral.  These sounds all invoke the past for some nostalgic reason or other, which helps to sell their sound, but it’s the military focus that proves to be most interesting thematically.

 Tonight, Two Great Ships… 

Conceptually, the American Civil War loosely holds The Monitor together.  The title comes from the USS Monitor, the first ironclad warship in the United States Navy and used against fellow Americans in the Battle of Hampton Roads. Each of the songs are separated by readings of historical documents from Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Jefferson Davis, and William Lloyd Garrison.  In the making-of documentary for the album, Stickles describes why he chose this concept:

“Remember when we learned about it as kids, and we were led to believe that after the Civil War, things pretty much changed?  I just don’t really think that’s true, because so much of the stuff that was at the core of the Civil War is still around.  You, know, racism, people judging each other, people isolating themselves from each other based on whatever little group they think they fit into…that’s never changed, that’s never gone away, that’s a part of American life everyday.”

The Monitor is loaded with these themes.  Remember all those references to military music, especially with the snare marches and the bagpipes?  Remember how “A More Perfect Union” suddenly starts chanting “So rally around the flag, boys, rally once again / Shouting the battle cry of freedom!”  It’s the same trick Springsteen pulled in “Born in the USA,” where a seemingly patriotic chorus is ironically set against a clear protest song.  This is just as unsettling: the “fun anthem” factor described earlier comes partially from the patriotism they invoke, but conceptually Stickles is describing a nation still divided and rallying around their own flags. “Four Score and Seven” ends with Stickles screaming over and over again “It’s still us against them, it’s still us against them” before conceding “And they’re winning”.  It’s a terrifying prospect.

Internally, Stickles seems at war with himself as well.  “No Future Part Three” is about dealing with depression and burying emotions to the point where he can only comfort himself with “You’ll always be a loser (and that’s okay)”. 

So what’s the solution?  Well, Stickles doesn’t leave us entirely out in the cold, at least not without a few beers and friends to keep us company.  In the album’s greatest moment in “The Battle of Hampton Roads,” Stickles lays out the following nihilistic self-destructive way to get by:

“And so now, when I drink I’m going to drink to excess

And when I smoke, I will smoke gaping holes in my chest

And when I scream, I will scream until I’m gasping for breath

And when I get sick, I’ll stay sick for the rest of my days

Peddling hate out the back of a Chevy Express

Each one a fart in the face of your idea of success

And if this be thy will, then fucking pass me the cup

And I’m sorry, Dad, no I’m not making this up”

It’s not a healthy life, and there’s a twinge of regret in that last line, but behind it all is a fierce desire to live fully in spite of the world around us going to hell.  It’s really not so different from Springsteen’s Born to Run – despite a town that “rips the bones from your back,” he plans to break out: “It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win”.  If musically The Monitor is Springsteen filtered through a punk lens, then thematically Stickles is laying down a punk-ified Springsteen ethos. 

This is how we make sense of the crazy paradox that is The Monitor.  Its crazy fun music initially doesn’t mesh well with the lyrics lashing out at everyone in Stickles’ sight, but beneath it all, this is music to “drink to excess” and scream until you’re “gasping for breath” to.  It’s loud communal music built to bring people together for a drunken and rowdy time on a Friday night.

 DIY

Nowhere is this more apparent than in a live Titus Andronicus concert. I saw them twice in 2016: once in Charlottesville in the spring, and once in Richmond during the fall.  Both times I went alone, but both times as soon as the band hit the stage, there was a palpable sense of community in the crowd. Stickles began both shows by warning everybody not to get TOO close without consent, promising a fun and safe night, and launching into one of their hits.  As the shows went on, especially once they hit “A More Perfect Union,” there was a tangible unity as people had their arms around each other screaming “RALLY AROUND THE FLAG!”  For a few hours, there was no more of that “us against them” which The Monitor is concerned with.  There was just “us,” and that’s a powerful feeling. 

To this end, Titus Andronicus have a relentless DIY (do it yourself) work ethic regarding touring.  They handle all the driving, they set up and take down their own equipment for shows, and they generally give off the impression of being a hard-working local band that deserves your respect.  There’s a degree of integrity that comes with such a work ethic, and it translates into the authenticity and honesty that makes their music popular.  In a 2012 interview with Pitchfork, Stickles says:

“I value in music much the same things I value in regular life. Particularly honesty.  I can only speak about y own perceptions.  I’m no good at writing fiction.  It seemed to me that the best thing to do was to try opening myself up as much as possible.”

A solid DIY attitude can only get you so popular, of course.  Within the indie community, major publications can make or break your career, and Stickles has a complicated relationship with these writers.  In a SPIN long form piece on the band, they note “Titus have a generally conflicted relationship with Pitchfork – the publication’s positive reviews of the band’s first two albums helped give them their early momentum, something Stickles openly recognizes.  But it was the same site’s lukewarm review of Local Business [the follow-up to The Monitor] that helped start the pendulum of hype swinging against them in 2013…”  Unlike songs from the Tin Pan Alley era that were aggressively marketed by the “Hit Factory,” the modern indie music scene relies on people keeping their ear to the ground or looking to places like Pitchfork that act as gatekeepers for music. This fierce interplay between the hardworking DIY community and the exposure that larger mainstream publications can provide is what allows Titus Andronicus to survive as a popular band within their own scene.

 A Loser (And That’s Okay)

If it hadn’t been for those larger publications, I never would have listened to Titus Andronicus, and so I’m grateful for that.  Since I first heard The Monitor nearly two years ago, it has had a massive impact on my life. Initially, it was just a really, really fun album.  I loved the grandiosity behind the music and the concept and admired the sheer ambition of the project.  It wouldn’t be until several months later, around February 2016, that it started to take on another meaning.  I was going through some hard times, personally and academically, and for the first time “You will always be a loser” revealed its true cathartic power to me. The Monitor emotionally grafted itself to me over those few weeks, and I began to seriously consider whether it was my favorite album of all time.

On March 2, Titus Andronicus played at The Southern in Charlottesville. That night was pivotal in my life. The funk I had been going through for several weeks was wiped out as soon as I joined a rowdy crowd in screaming our way through the most cathartic parts of The Monitor.  Beyond finally lifting my mood, that night awoke a strong appreciation for seeing a great band in a small, local venue for under $20.  While I’m no concert aficionado, I started to make the effort to attend more of those types of shows.  There’s something about the intimate setting that makes everything feel so much more alive, and I never would have learned that without Titus Andronicus.

Finally, The Monitor marked a strong shift in my music taste.  Before it, I spent most of my time listening to prog, metal, or folk music, with a touch of emo here and there.  With The Monitor, it felt like everything collapsed perfectly into this new sound ­– the aggressive energy of metal, the elaborate song structures of prog, and the lyrical sincerity of Brand New and mewithoutYou were all there.  Afterwards, I became more enamored with the Springsteen sound, as I was invested in bands like The Gaslight Anthem, Japandroids, and The Hold Steady. Knowing that Titus fit under the “indie rock/punk” label, I began to look more into recent indie bands, which is most of what I’ve listened to over the last year.  They helped me find my sound when I was starting to get fatigued from metal.  This indirectly led me to join our college radio station, where I’ve met some of my favorite people at UVA.

If it sounds like I’m gushing…well, I am.  The Monitor is my favorite album. It’s got the energy when I’m upbeat, it’s got the lyrics when I’m feeling down, and it holds a huge chunk of my soul at this point.   I wear my band shirt with pride at this point simply because they’re a part of who I am today.  “Titus Andronicus Forever…And Ever.”