Review Summary: Titus Andronicus delivers with an angry and emotional classic.
Throughout every persons life, there is a period where they are filled with a feeling of pure and absolute frustration. Frustration with their enemies, frustration with their friends, frustration with themselves and frustration with the world.
Titus Andronicus' sophomore album, [i]The Monitor[i], is about that frustration, that undying sense of injustice and anger with everything around you, that feeling of heading to the bar and drinking into you're just a bitter, inebriated shell of yourself who drunkenly shouts at anything that moves.
The Monitor, due to it's ridiculous scale of being a loosely themed Civil War concept album filled to the brim with historical quotes and classic rock tributes, lends a immense importance to that feeling that I have never seen done justice in any other medium. However, what prevents this album from being a overblown ***show of epic proportions, is Titus' ability to find liberation in their never-ending rage. Throughout
The Monitor's 65-minute runtime, Patrick Stickles and the gang have a blast blowing through wicked guitar solos, jamming interludes, and their signature style of anthemic shouts for the heavens, delivered by Patrick's barbed vocals, most likely one of the most integral parts of the album.
Despite the length of most of the songs on the album, Titus' keeps your attention locked in a vice, as they switch between varying styles of classic rock at a breakneck speed. On the epic "Four Score And Seven", the song switches from a mournful Stickles to sing only with a lone guitar, to a brass-heavy and awe-inspiring chorus, to a panicked rebellious cry in the last section. The variety on
The Monitor is astounding.
Throughout the record, Stickles struggles with the demons of his world, both outside and within, as he belts every line like he's on the verge of death. However, in probably the best song on the album, 14-minute closer "The Battle of Hampton Roads" Stickles voices everything he views wrong and corrupt with the world before coming the realization that the unnamed enemy that pervades
The Monitor is most embodied by a homophobic frat bro. His willing acceptance of the status quo, is the
enemy, the willingness to give up the fight that Stickles' struggles to continue going. The cold shock of this stops the music dead in its tracks, as Stickles, in his last act of defiance, doubles down, comes to terms with his failures then states that he's going to fail some more, become an even bigger asshole and live his life to the fullest in a hedonistic fury as he smokes and drinks hisself to death.
In the final moments of the album, Stickles states that because he's fighting, struggling against the enemy that's insulted, humiliated, beat and broken him despite the futile nature of his struggle, is half the battle itself. Stickles acceptance of his lifelong frustration and his willingness to keep the fight going, is what turns this album from an astounding and absolutely brilliant rock record, to a classic and seminal work.
TITUS ANDRONICUS FOREVER
