Listening to the earlier Seizing Elias and later version on The Airing Of Grievances is a study in how Patrick Stickles “Albert Camus” evolved and how Stickle’s learnt to present a song.
Titus Andronicus’ version is a hard rock force blazing to a crescendo:all high impact melody. It wasn’t always so. Stripped of the overly loud guitars, stripped off the thunder and lightening and traversing coda, the earlier “Albert Camus” sounds like folk-rock by a punk rock band. As if he wasn’t sure what he could get away with.
The song itself, the song proper,as sung by Seizing Elias, is complete. But the arrangement is so dynamic in Grievances the existential question mark becoomes a call to disarm:a baffled wonder at blankness.
The former isn’t that?. There is something of a treatise in the Seizing Elias version: it is a taking of position, both songs are still us against them but the earlier one is less didatic and more analytic.
The Titus version is better. Neither song is slight but the Titus, in context as well, is a rallying cry for a romanticism that rejects innocence and lies.
Somewhere inbetween, Stickles became a better singer and learnt how to manipulate his sound into a wall of melodic power. Listen to them both and piece it together yourself.