Titus Andronicus - The Monitor

In the spring of 2010, I was living in my parent’s basement, scrounging around in my home town, substitute teaching to occupy my time, and clinging to remains of college life that had ended only months earlier.  Sometime early that spring, my brother sent me a leak of Titus Andronicus’s The Monitor.  As a recent graduate struggling to make my way through the graduate wasteland of 2009, the existential crisis at the forefront of the album immediately resonated with me.   With the financial collapse happening earlier that fall, Titus Andronicus captured the emotions of millions of twenty something’s entering the world of adulthood with no place to go.

These guys went for it all.   In rock and roll music in recent years, I can only think of a handful of records with so much ambition that worked this well,  (I’m thinking Green Day’s American Idiot, The Hold Steady’s Separation Sunday, Wilco’sYankee Hotel Foxtrot).  The Monitor rocks more aggressive, authentic, articulate, and righteous than any record released in my lifetime.  This is what rock and roll and punk music is all about: 

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject,  I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. I am in earnest. I will not equivocate,  I will not excuse,  I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard. - William Llyod Garrison

Titus Andronicus have become one of my favorite bands.  Songwriter and lead singer Patrick Stickles decided to chase rock and roll instead of pursuing graduate school and becoming a teacher.  He was still living at his parent’s house after moving out of his girlfriend’s place in Greenpoint, Brooklyn before embarking to tour for the new record, Local Business.

Maybe this is simply a pretentious emo record for those in their twenties and thirties that came out losers on the other end and want to piss and moan about the rules that led them there.  Maybe that’s what great rock and roll has always stood for in some sense.

Some interesting facts:

-The first single, “Four Score and Seven” was released on Lincoln’s birthday.

-The album came out on the anniversary of the Battle of Hampton Roads. 

-The liner notes include a New Jersey Honor Roll of musicians and a Civil War recommended reading list. 

-w.u.