Moni-Tour de Force

I recently watched a video online in which Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles, in a rare solo performance, absolutely butchered “Darkness on the Edge of Town” by Bruce Springsteen. He forgot the lyrics a few different times (admitting it during the song), hit wrong chords, and shrieked out the lyrics, proving that his ragged delivery works best (and probably only) within the fray of his own songs. And to be fair, the odds were against him: if you pick a Bruce Springsteen song and decide to cover it with just a piano and your voice, how can the performance do anything but pale against the original?

However, this ambitious, admirable endeavour is what I often find so appealing about Titus Andronicus. The Monitor, their second full-length since the band formed in 2005, ups the ante from their first album, The Airing of Grievances, in nearly every way. It features longer songs, thicker production, and guest readings/performances from members of The Hold Steady, Vivian Girls, and Wye Oak. Even the themes carried from song to song are heavier in emotional depth. In Stickles’s own words, “[The Monitor] uses the American Civil War of 1861-1865 as an extended metaphor for the concerns addressed in a somewhat linear narrative.” A Civil War concept album, you say? Well, kind of.

Take the opening song, “A More Perfect Union.” It opens with an Abraham Lincoln quotation, and as the song erupts, it’s immediately evident how much the production has improved from their first album. The multiple guitar tracks resonate just the right way, and Stickles’s voice is, seemingly for the first time ever in the band’s recorded history, clear and intelligible. Even Eric Harm’s drums shatter the casing of mud the production never allowed for on The Airing of Grievances. Then, after a nod to the Boss in the cheesy/awesome lyric, “Tramps like us, baby we were born to die!” the song explodes into an extended Dinosaur Jr.-esque guitar solo. A daring first song, but a wise choice, as it lays everything the album can offer on the table right away.

The Civil War theme is no more prevalent than in the middle tracks of The Monitor. Craig Finn’s reading from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass at the end of the “A Pot in Which to Piss” poignantly segues into the album’s first single, “Four Score and Seven.” Lyrics like “This is a war we can’t win,” a battle hymn middle section, and the explosive ending all provide a reminder that the Civil War is the theme connecting this batch of songs. Elsewhere, older Titus numbers like “To Old Friends and New” and “Titus Andronicus Forever” receive some much needed re-recordings and exist here in more potent forms. The former features a shockingly organic duet, with Jenn Wasner of Baltimore duo Wye Oak lending the song a performance I can’t see it existing without.

Elsewhere, nods to influences like Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen also place the songwriting in a proper context. Besides the album’s rollicking fourth song, “Richard II,” (which seems to serve as a sequel to Bragg’s “Richard”) “The Battle of Hampton Roads,” the album’s epic finale, deserves special attention. Referred to by the band as a “fourteen-minute Billy Bragg knock-off,” it references the Civil War battle in which the USS Monitor (the album’s namesake) was valiantly defeated in December of 1862. Besides the aforementioned reference to Springsteen’s “Born to Run” in the opening track, it is also buoyed by “The Battle of Hampton Roads,” in which Stickles declares a few minutes in that “I’m destroying everything that wouldn’t make me more like Bruce Springsteen.” The nosedive guitar solo and the massive crescendo in the middle of the song definitely make it one of the best songs
Titus Andronicus has produced yet.

However, like Patrick Stickles said himself in an interview, I see Paul Westerberg as Stickles’s biggest influence, particularly in the drunken romp “Theme from ‘Cheers’’’ and “No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future,” in which “You will always be a loser” will replace “Your life is over!” as the shout along lyric at their shows, if it hasn’t already. While The Monitor is by no means a perfect album, I was reminded again of that distinctive Stickles performance. Though the band often stumbles to the finish line, it’s a blast to watch them arrive, and it’s never for lack of effort.