The Monitor reminds me of Exile On Main Street and not just because I love both albums but always because both are concept albums where you hafta meet them half way to grasp the concept and both are intensely personal, highly subjective, singalong albums. “Arrrrrgh let it rock” is the footstep ahead of “born to die” and though the leader of Titus Andronicus, Patrick Stickles, would seem to have nothing in common with the thirty year old Mick Jagger, well they have something in common.
They are both rock stars and they both know how to lead a band and lead a sound.
And they both have integrity to burn (if you don’t think the sixties Jagger had integrity you don’t get rock, if you don’t think their disdain for the working class was brave you don’t understand how clas bias works).
And they both love rock.
And they both reveal and hide at the same time.
The Monitor, Titus Andronicus, hides in plain sight.
It’s a concept album, about the USS Monitor and its battle with the Miramack where the concept doesn’t matter, Stickles claims. Or doesn’t quite matter. Or is just an excuse for a party and believe me you get one here.
Hmmm.
Both of Stickles parents are teachers, his father a history teacher, and his brother is in the navy (I will transcribe the tape and post the interview on Saturday). Stickles was thisclose to becoming a teacher before choosing a career as a popular musician in a punk rock band.
Think about that and look at Titus Andronicus first album, The Airing Of Grievances, as a college kid raging against a preordained life he doesn’t even nearly want.
Now look at album number two as an immediate follow up. Stickles was meant to become a teacher, meant to follow in the family footsteps. A man leaves to Boston to get a graduate degree in teaching, decides being a teacher isn’t for him, and comes home to the life that is really waiting for him. The conflict is worked as a civil war metaphor where his inner self (what he is thinking about what’s happenning to him) is played out with Civil War metaphors. On Exile, Jagger does the same thing with black R&B on a tour of the deep south.
Within the confines of this closeted and somewhat predestrian view of the album, American history, in this case the civil war, is almost invading the album. It is an outside force tearing at the fabric of Titus (man and bands) personal life, his internal click clock, his soul played out in metaphor: what life does he follow? Who wins?
And he rejects it teaching and goes back with his tail between his legs BUT something is awaiting him and it is something we know is awaiting him, Titus Andronicus: bands, friends, brothers, love, sisters, a life he can see a value in, and the right -so American, by the way, to pursue happiness. All of which happens after the album is over but so what? Because of Stickles can make the life he wants so can we.
It is a GREAT American story and it is the story of The Monitor (even the ship: which beat the Miramack by having a 360 degree gun instead of Miramack’s three guns on each side, by changing direction, The Monitor won). It is the option to move hidden as a parable about losing.
Of course it is the music that gives it away.
The music which rumbles on in seven, eight minute quivocations of sound, are all about movement, freedom, change: everybody mentions the Springsteen and Billy Bragg quotes. How about the Dylan, how about “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”. Really, the song owns to many antecedents (and while reading loads of reviews today as I tried to formulate my feelings, I noticed the Replacements being mentioned. I am not the world’s biggest Replacements fan but I sure did love Hootenany).
If what Stickles wants to do, if what Jagger wanted to do whether shouting out the deep South or shouting out Angela Davis, was to find, not power, but fulfullment in commune with an audience and by expressing his deepest fears and desires, , both Jagger and Stickles succeeded. Maybe everybody who plays rock for a living want that but just can’t do it.
Bookended by two absolute genius songs “A Perfect Union” and “The Battle Of Hampton Roads” taken from a search for a New New Jersey all the way to “I’m going back to New Jersey, I do believe they’ve had enough of me” and with one third Civil War song “Four Score And Seven” in the middle, the other seven songs drift in and around the album. Two of them, “Titus Andronicus Forever” and “…And Ever” are a paranoid punk roar, and one in the middle, as great a drinking song as you could hope for (and influenced by Spider Bags) “Theme From Cheers”. “To Old Friends And New” also reminds me of Dan McGee when McGee is in country ballad mode. And three near the beginning all of which eventual merge into waves of melodic power.
Some critics have nitpicked a little, saying Stickles doesn’t sustain it.
I disagree.
I think he sustains a mood of disquiet community, of triumph through song, from violins to bagpies and always ready to crush with a wall of gorgeous guitars at the drop of a moment.
I know I am stating the obvious but the point here is lyric plus music: as depressed, as loserish, as distraught, as rasping and pained as the vocals may be, the bottom line will always happen when the album is over lyric
ally but never musically: musically Titus and their audience emerge victorious.
ally but never musically: musically Titus and their audience emerge victorious.
. Patrick got out, he found another route, he won his internal civil war and made himself the life he wanted.
It’s the great American success story.
It’s the great American album.