“While we’re young
Boys, everyone,
Rise your glasses high
Here’s to the good times
Here’s to the home team
Kiss good times goodbye”
-Titus Andronicus
I love Titus the way I love Joy Division. Not thematically. Not aesthetically. Not musically. Family. Joy Division were from Macclesfield. Patricia Caudwell (a love of my life) was from Macclesfield, I was born half an hour from there, my best friend at the time spent the night before he went to jail hanging out there. It’s part of my home, it’s part of where I am who I am. Titus are over the bridge from my third home New York: just as I can seen the gray dust and green hills and hear em in Joy Division (especially Unknown Pleasure), I can see and smell the garden state -the industrial gardens at the state of decay in Titus Andronicus. My friends live there. I get it.
And I love Titus for that.
But I mostly love them for Titus.
I haven’t written a long post in ages because my feeling is people don’t wanna read em and I don’t wanna pontificate or tell anybody what they wanna do. But I adore this band. They are what I returned to the game for -I want you to hear em because they matter and not to just me. I read a review where I bloke got their first album and blew off a concert so he could listen to them on their Ipod. They are that band.
Andronicus are a buzzed punk rock band with a genius for melody like Jesus And Mary Chain had and a sound which seems to be a type of definintion of rock and roll. You can see it in the last three lines in the quote above, hope, loyalty, no hope. But always a type of hope, a rock music hope, that in sound, in togetherness: that as social animals we can outlive our mortality. Titus are our brothers and in such are a unique thing. In “My Time Outside The Wound” lead singer Patrick Stickles considers his twenty odd years just so: something sorta meaningless, and disheartening, but the band are singing “wooo hooo woooo” in the back ground and it elevates your misery.
Better still is a song, “Four Square And Seven”, off their upcoming The Monitor, is as good as a Billy Bragg has written: “I don’t wanna die just like a dog, I wanna die just like a man”, from an album that has something to do with the civil war, seems like a working class pray. And it sounds awesome. It sounds like the best thing you’ve ever heard.
The band has a roar and the song seems to emerge from it: it’s like a secret buried deep and then unearthed as though if you keep faith with Titus they will give you something you didn’t know was there and more, Stickles has a voice both raw and caressing at the same time – when he goes high you can hear his voice scrape against your ear. The effect is intensely melodic, extreme catharcism and deep inky blackness.
Live they are awesome but they have to feel it. At the Whitney they were defending their audience against the guards. At the Vampire Weekend they were staking the claim to not caring one way or the other. The song leads to a build up and a cathartic singalong at least on the first album. The second album (what I’ve heard of it) sounds like a series of movements and I enjoyed them less live. Having said that, anybody who can’t enjoy this band going insane on stage maybe isn’t that keen on rock and roll.
Their first theme song, “Titus Andronicus” (there is also “Titus Andronicus Forever” but I don’t have a handle on it because I can’t get my hands on an MP3) is the most joyful song every written about being blocked. It looks unblinkering inton nothingness and all it finds is another reason to sing and dance. “No more cigarettes, no more having sex, no more drinking till you fall on the floor…”
Of course the coda is accurate but if you can’t scream “Your life is over” in the face of your imminent demise, what can you with it?
Titus, me and Marie Lynn, we’re all very collegiate and well read. We know our Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Arendt -you name it, we’ve assimilated. But me, being much older than everybody else, just assimilates it and moves on. Titus -nah, Titus and Marie Lynn are the best type of theoligans (I don’t know if Stickles is one or not, Marie Lynn might not like the lapsed designation) LAPSED CATHOLICS. They struggle against nothingness because somewhere or else they have the traditonalism of faith the way I have the traditions of shared culture with them.
I’ve written about these guys and I know I’ve written about them a lot here. But Titus is the name of the game -it’s why we spend our lives writing about music.