Review Summary: The will to live can be an awful curse/ on an earth that's just a lot of dirt/ whenever it is that you're getting hurt/ that's just the will to live doin' its work
Truth be told, I’d kind of forgotten about Titus Andronicus, a band whose heyday ran parallel to a period in my life when their scrappy existentialist outlook was, at times, my main motivation to keep getting up in the morning. It was at one of the lowest points in my life that I discovered The Monitor; my father had very recently passed, my new career had totally failed to live up to what I’d been promised, and I found myself living alone in a totally new city hundreds of miles from my still-grieving family and my friends. So, when that titanic, 14 minute struggle against despair that is The Battle of Hampton Roads first hit me, it hit like a freight train and while to credit it with keeping me alive would be more than a bit much, it was one of the medications in my arsenal that I found myself turning to most often. That teeth-clenched, sloppy vitality in the face of a life that has very little chance of meaning anything resonated deeply with my 20 year old self and told me, before I ever thought of turning to Camus or Kierkegaard, that even a life without purpose could be given meaning and even joy through sheer bloody-mindedness, and with the help of an anthemic chorus or two.
And then…well, what the hell happened? As though they’d spent every last ounce of creative energy they’d had on that one magnum opus, Titus Andronicus subsequently churned out mediocrity after mediocrity, with ever-diminishing returns for the time invested in listening. By the time they got to An Obelisk it seemed pretty evident that what they as a group had spent so much energy trying to conjure up on The Monitor, a will to live, had been supplanted by a seemingly autonomous drive to just exist, to keep churning out scattershot, unfocused releases with little of the rage and exuberance that they’d shown so brilliantly in their early career.
So when I saw that the newest offering from Titus Andronicus was entitled The Will To Live, my curiosity was sparked. Was it possible that this band that had seemingly lost everything that had made them such a force of nature could have rediscovered that energy and ethos? Was this the comeback that they’d been due for since almost a decade ago? Well, sorta.
It’s appropriate that The Will To Live should find Titus Andronicus trying to rediscover the old sense of vitality, though where An Obelisk’s attempt to do the same was an all-fire-no-heat retread of their old anthemic punk-rock fury, The Will To Live looks back farther than Strummer and Lydon and takes as its starting point the rollicking hard rock of the likes of Thin Lizzy and Alice Cooper. And for the most part, although Stickles and co. don’t ever deviate too far from that template, it works. The songwriting is stronger, more focused than it's sounded in years; there’s a sense in Stickles’ lyrics that he is really reaching for something he believes in again, that the will to live isn’t just a catchphrase or a simple retread of well-worn themes, but the ethos that he’s always going to have to struggle towards. The choruses are, in several places, more memorable than anything they’ve done since No Future Part IV, the themes that they’ve always been embroiled in are more poetically and touchingly expressed than they’ve been for a good while.
But despite these upsides, The Will To Live never really pushes past “better than it’s been”. My Mother and (I’m) Screwed are a one-two punch of hard-hitting bar rock that totally embrace the Thin Lizzy vibes. Dead Meat is a vicious little piece of punk that wouldn’t be out of place on their debut. 69 Stones, probably the most touching and heartfelt moment on the album, is a comfortably world-weary piano ballad that makes for a warm, serene coda to all the angst we know and mostly still love from Andronicus. But throughout, the impression that I kept getting was mostly relief that Titus Andronicus was still capable of this kind of output, rather than any feeling that these were songs I’d ever come back to more than a few times.
Ultimately, The Will To Live becomes much more enjoyable with the acceptance that Titus Andronicus are probably never going to reach for the heights of The Monitor again. And really, nor should they. The vast majority of bands would kill to have a record as indelible, as perennially vital as The Monitor or even The Airing of Grievances, and with a theme that was so thoroughly explored on the former record, any further exploration ends up redundant. While that’s at least partially true here (after all the themes here really aren’t that far removed from everything they’ve covered before), it is an older, wiser Titus Andronicus that continues to navigate their struggle through a meaningless world, all while keeping hearts firmly on sleeves. And while The Will To Live might just end up being a lone bright spot in an otherwise lackluster late career, it’s nonetheless a bright spot that is at least worth visiting, if just as a pleasant reminder of what this band was once capable of.
