According to Titus Andronicus, The Monitor, their massive followup to 2008’s The Airing of Grievances, is a record about a few things. It’s about the American Civil War, moving from New Jersey to Boston, “regional identity, emotional anesthetization and the heavy yoke of trying to live decently in indecent times.” These aspirations are all over the album, but before any of that becomes clear there’s a much more apparent explosion of post-adolescent angst, a whole lot of drunken shit-kicking, ragged takes on Springsteen and long songs. Inexplicably, almost all of it works, and what should have failed spectacularly instead manages to capture a ton in its sweep.
A big part of this probably comes from the fact that the band seems as confident in what they’re doing as they are certain that what they’re doing is completely absurd. The album’s second track (and its second-shortest), “Titus Andronicus Forever,” largely exists to establish a theme to be later repeated in “…And Ever,” a chorus that consists predominantly of shouting “The enemy is everywhere” after a sample of someone reading a letter from the abolitionist publication “The Liberator.” Similar excerpts exist to hold together the concept, but rarely do they seem vital. What is vital, however, is the sheer volume of noise being made, especially in the face of the album’s ragged production.
At its center are a number of songs big on despair and deliberately buried, at least partially, in murk. “A Pot In Which to Piss” is a wall of shoegaze-leaning guitar textures that threaten to swallow singer Patrick Stickles’ vocals totally before war drums and the broken E Street Band arrangements come in to explode its second and third parts, moving swiftly from simple chords to a rollicking piano solo straight into droning strings as Stickles details his own refusal to surrender in the face of inevitable failure. “Four Score and Seven” and the country-tinged, three-part “Theme From ‘Cheers'” (not actually a cover of the Cheers theme) function in similar modes, and no matter how wasted the songs’ protagonists are, not a minute of the album’s hour-plus run time seems frivolous, even on the 14-minute closer, and every repeated line turns into what’s probably already become a striking singalong live.
Though a number of other bands’ members appear across the record, including players from Ponytail, Wye Oak and the Hold Steady, the most striking turn comes from Cassie Ramone of Vivian Girls on “To Old Friends and New.” While she isn’t a particularly great singer, both her solo turn and her duet with Stickles are stunningly, unbelievably effective, and proof that Vivian Girls’ real weakness is in their songwriting, as they could in fact have memorable tunes if delivered like this.
As a whole, The Monitor is, simply put, about a hundred times better than it should have been or has any right to be. It outperforms and shines where about a thousand terrible American guitar bands with ambitions, nods to Springsteen and a nasal singer fall completely and totally flat. And the fact that it somehow stands out in such a crowded, often completely unbearable field has to be a sign of something.
