""I'm destroying everything that wouldn't make me more like Bruce Springsteen""
If the Hold Steady brought bar rock to the arena, Titus Andronicus brought arena rock to the bar. Their latest, the comically ambitious Civil War-themed opus The Monitor, presents broad-stroke grandeur and unabashed zeal packed like sardines and dragged through the kind of muddy terrain most bands' PR teams vow to avoid. But Titus weren't born to run from their confrontational aesthetics, and their songs embrace the putrid reality beneath a synthetic flair.
Glen Rock is a full 66 miles from Springsteen's hometown of Long Branch, N. J., but The Monitor is a whole lot closer than that. Tugging on the coattails of New Jersey's most iconic songwriter, Titus frontman Patrick Stickles does more actual singing this time around. Paired with the cleaner production value, he aligns himself more with his home state's consummate rock legend than previously held yardstick Conor Oberst. But instead of using Xeroxed bravado like New Jersey cohorts the Gaslight Anthem, Titus unsubscribe from the hopeful escapism and paint the gruff portrait of a blue-collar America bound to stagnancy, not the one clawing its way out.
""However much you paid for your many destructions, it was too much.""
The Monitor exists in a different economic zone, one that stands in firm opposition to the capitalist big wigs stifling originality with corporatized street culture. They appropriated everything we ever loved, so the best we can do is hold on tight to the things we hate. Rock 'n' roll is too flooded with superficial exhibitionists to bother trying to save it, so the biggest imprint a band can have nowadays is by destroying it.
Accordingly, Stickles makes himself out to be something of a martyr; a scholar trapped in an environment whose inhabitants are convinced they are helpless. He's at the mouth of Plato's cave, privy to the enlightenment but unable to converse with his liberated peers. The only way to escape the puppet show and make himself heard, or so it seems, is by taking explosives to the cave itself.
""I took the one thing that made me beautiful and I threw it away""
If a Civil War concept album sounds unattainably vast, that's because it probably is. But Stickles' description of the project was a bit facetious—The Monitor is a concept album about the lessons of the Civil War that are still resonant today. By removing the narrative from the constraints of historical realities, Stickles floats his tale to each thematic touchstone in a casual way, neither overbroad nor pedantic. He attacks the complacency and superficial attraction that plagued slave-owning America and how the lingering effects of synthetic aesthetics manifest in today's throwaway culture. It's a grim depiction, but they never said it was going to be pretty.
Titus brought several friends along for The Monitor's journey, but the vocal performance turned in by Wye Oak's Jenn Wasner on ""To Old Friends and New"" bestows a small dose of levity and beauty to the dense project and instills an elegance and vulnerability to Titus' persistent hostility. And when the shroud of light-heartedness wears out and the fuzz transitions to ""...And Ever,"" their anthemic rallying cries of ""The enemy is everywhere"" are infused with a marching piano and a parading saxophone, celebratory in their own self-righteousness. An ugly message doesn't need to sound garish.
""The things I used to hate, I've learned to accept""
The Monitor isn't going to convert many Titus-haters, nor should it. The group's refusal to cater to outsiders' norms is a fundamental tenet of their ethos, because the minute they give in to corporate America is the minute they fade into irrelevance. But The Monitor accomplishes more than a rehashing of established ideas. The Airing of Grievances, Titus' 2008 debut, showed the band fully formed, clawing at societal materialism with punishing ferocity; but The Monitor shows that same band applying their sound and their irreverent message to a fully realized album. The Monitor plays out like a single piece, each peak bleeding into the subsequent valley to the point where the 14-minute closer, ""The Battle of Hampton Roads,"" is equally as digestible as the sub-two minute ""Titus Andronicus Forever.""
Titus encapsulate the resplendent opulence of world-renowned rock acts, but their punk-rooted, heart-on-sleeve earnestness aligns them with more approachable, yet less recognizable alt-country bands like the Spider Bags. Titus are primed for the big stage, but their hearts of rock 'n' roll gold won't let them sell out to fame or fortune. Ironically, this self-defacing moral code, the humble directness of arena-sized rock in bar-sized portions, is exactly what makes The Monitor, and Titus Andronicus as a whole, such a monolithic success.
