After having read many times about them on rock nyc, I was really excited to see Titus Andronicus live at the FYF, and you know how it is when you expect a lot from a band, you may be disappointed! No way, it was certainly not the case, Titus Andronicus was probably one of the best acts, or even the best, I saw on Sunday, a furious energy and a real defiance embodied in music.
They were 5 of them on stage, 4 guys and a girl, they looked completely unpretentious but unleashed this sound and these lyrics you can really feel in the deepest parts of your body. I suppose there is a double experience at this level, you literally feel Patrick Stickles screaming his lungs out in all your viscera but perceive his clever lyrics in your brain, although it is always difficult for me to get all the lyrics during a live show; this is why it is such a fulfilling experience.
All the songs by Titus Andronicus seem epic, grandiose, they are long battles and it feels like it will be the last one of your life each time. There are laps of rests in these battles, song-breaking riffs, but they are only there to allow the song to restart, shifting in another direction, with more fury and anger and some other hooks. And when I say grandiose, it is not in the transcendent sense of the term, all these songs are about human battles, and human failures. During the powerful ‘No Future Part III: Escape from No Futur’, the lines ‘You will always be a loser now/You will always be a loser/You will always be a loser and that’s okay’ were screamed more than sung by thousand of people in unison, and this was grandiose.
In reviews, they have been compared to Bruce Springsteen, but they translate much more inebriated violence than the E Street band. Have you ever seen people surfing the crowd during a boss concert? It’s more punk, more irreverent and definitively more fist in the air all the time. And I thought that Patrick sounded much less like Bright Eyes live than on the record, his deep-seated, gut-wrenching outcries being much more liberating that those of Conor Oberst.
With his usual black beard, his plain white tee-shirt, he presented the band at the beginning of their set with the simple declaration, ‘We are Titus Andronicus, from New Jersey’, and graciously promoted at the end of the too short set (35 min!) a concert at the Viper room of their touring mate ‘Free energy’.
The heat was intense, the sun was still high in the sky when they played, and the crowd was jumping, shouting, moshing, producing a heavy cloud of dust arising well above our heads, but they did not care except for the few who put their bandanas above their nose and mouth, looking as rebellious as the pounding drum beats of Eric Harm, the effective keyboard strokes of David Robbins, or the dueling guitar riffs of Ian Graetzer, Patrick Stickles and Amy Klein, who energetically played a blue electric violin on some songs.
Rebellion? The lyrics are full of it, after all Patrick Stickles is a man who wrote a song about the author of ‘The Rebel’, and when he shouts lyrics like ‘I was born to die just like a man!/It’s still us against them/And they’re winning’ during ‘Four Score and Seven’ or ‘I will not deny my humanity/I’ll be rolling in it like a pig in feces’ during ‘Richard II’, you understand better of what kind of rebellion he is talking about: it’s a scream to regain one’s freedom and dignity even if ‘this is a war we can’t win’.
At the end of the set, I wanted to try something since Iman had told me he knew Patrick quite well. But the security was completely inflexible, and people who had tried to go in the pit without a press pass, had been instantaneously ejected by the tough looking guards. Even the photographers were rudely told to move out of the pit after a few songs, none of them ever stayed there during the full set of an act. So there was no way I could have spoken to Patrick. I nevertheless hold out one of my rock nyc card, on the back of which I had written ‘Iman says hello’, to one of the security person, asking him to give it to the singer when the band was unplugging its equipment. After a few hesitations, he did give the card to Patrick, who did not know where it was coming from but read it and put it in his pocket making an expression between a large smile and a laughing face.