Showing posts with label titus andronicus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label titus andronicus. Show all posts
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Concert Review: Titus Andronicus


Last night, Glen Rock, New Jersey-born Titus Andronicus, supported by Brooklyn indie outfit Lost Boy?, kicked off their coast-to-coast Manifest Destiny tour at the Tralf.

I was finishing up my own tour of every rest stop between Buffalo and Kalamazoo, Michigan, which explains why I was late for the opener.

Twelve screaming hours of highwaybabybladder brought me home just in time to dump bags and suitcases in a mad heap and run downtown for the show. I parked the car and hurried over to Main Street just in time to hear "Future Shock" by local partymonsters Mallwalkers humming through the walls.

A sports whistle solo was screaming down the hall while a bouncer eyed my license, and shit, shit, shit, I could still catch the last song!

But, just my luck, it was over before the glue on my wristband was dry.

Damn you, adequate security!

So I sat down with a $3 tank of Genny Light to acquaint myself with the next act, Lost Boy? ("It's a question"). Take an upbeat Sebadoh, add the high-pitched vocals of Math the Band and Benadryl-woozy guitars, and you've got Lost Boy?. They had their awkward moments ("Buffalo's been so good to us. You can shit on the walls as long as you tip." No response. I thought it was funny). But when they rocked, they rocked. The highlight was a song called "Bank," which starts off sounding like Tiny Tim, then kicks it up a third of the way through. Check it out:



'Course, most folks were there to see Titus Andronicus, who showed up as a four-piece - guitarist Liam Betson being the odd man out. Frontman Patrick Stickles played the part of super-literate rock star to a tee. He took his place at the helm in sunglasses and a hoodie, sounding a little soused and looking like he might keel over at any moment.

Happily, any worries about a half-assed, drunken set were allayed when Stickles ditched the glasses and Titus Andronicus started playing. The crowd was a little thinner than I'd expected, but we were ready for a show. Kids up front hopped when the music told them to hop and swayed when things got slow. Stickles guided us along like a piss-and-vinegar Virgil, explicating lyrics and making sure everyone was comfortable "in their own personal space."

As I said, the crowd did dance, but we seemed a little polite for a rock show. Maybe it was just a Monday night in Buffalo. Things got so quiet at one point that a dude clutching a plastic cup on his way to the back bar yelled, "Toronto's thing is nobody dances. In Buffalo, nobody talks!" Some smartass responded: "so shut up and dance!"

But it was all right. Guitar licks - from both Stickles and lead guitarist Adam Reich - were tight, and the rhythm section held their own. Reich and drummer Eric Harm switched places for a number, with Harm playing guitar and singing lead and Reich on skins - and it was a pretty impressive showing of musicianship all around. The crowd chanted "you will always be a loser" during "No Future Part Three" and all the "doo-doo-doo"s  and "your life is over"s during "Titus Andronicus," and all was rock and roll.

TA played some old songs, some from their latest, Local Business, and some from their upcoming project, which Stickles, ever sarcastic, called "CD Four." I didn't catch the name of the tune (and this was my first TA show, so forgive me), but their only major screw ups came during an "audible" in the set list which, if Stickles is to be believed, they'd only practiced a few times. Even then, it was rocking enough that any flubbed notes didn't matter.

One minor bitch: no encore. Encores are a little like a birthday card from grandma - you should be grateful you got anything, but you can't help but be disappointed when there's no money in the envelope. No one owes you an extra song, but it sure sucks when you don't get one. "They're holding us to an 11 o'clock curfew," said Stickles. Which may or may not have been true. Regardless, it was Monday in Buffalo. Some people had to work in the morning, y'know.


~Photo by Andrew Odien
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Tonight: Titus Andronicus w/Lost Boy ? & Mallwalkers


Does there need to be a meaning to life? What if the universe we inhabit is ultimately absurd and irreverent? Who cares?

Titus Andronicus explores these themes heavily in their musical catalog, but don’t think that you’ll be force fed from a tongue-numbing reservoir of doom at their show. Absurdity and meaninglessness are two of the best reasons to party that I know of. Slap that together with agitated, baby-shaking punk music and you have yourself a recipe for a damn good time. Or certain death, but that’s up to your discretion.

Tonight, Titus Andronicus’ lyrics may rattle your little brain and make you think, but that doesn’t mean you should zone out into your tacky shoelaces. Listen, but shake your ass as well, ‘cause these fellas from Jersey will break down concrete walls with their aural artillery. 

Brooklyn’s psychedelic punkers Lost Boy ? will set the tone by taking the inane and bizarre factor from bubbly to brimming. Buffalo’s own Mallwalkers are in attendance as well, and also ready to jab things into high gear.

Who says that nothing happens on a Monday night(8pm, $14)? If you hear that sigh of despair breathe past your lips, you better get to the Tralf.

 



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Just Announced: Titus Andronicus


ESI Events has had a pretty good week. After announcing Wild Nothing and Stars earlier in the week, they could have easily packed it in for the weekend. But no, they had one more show up their sleeve. On Monday, August 26th, New Jersey punks, Titus Andronicus, will make their raucous return to Buffalo. Having played both headlining shows at the Ninth Ward and supporting gigs for Okkervil River at Town Ballroom a couple years back, the Civil War loving rockers will be in town to support their third LP, Local Business, which we at the blog enjoyed very much. Tickets for the show go on sale tomorrow at noon for $12.



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Picking Up The Slack For MTV: Titus Andronicus & The So So Glos - No Sleep Till Brooklyn




The Beastie Boys made better albums than their 1986 debut Licensed To Ill, as future releases would feature more experimentation, and less immature lyrics. But if all we're talking about is pure fun, that album is pretty unmatched. Just about every track is hilarious, and has an instantly memorable hook.

 "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" is one of the most entertaining songs on the debut, which is why it was natural that it would be fun choice to cover. On their recent Bring Back The Dudes tour, New Jersey punks Titus Andronicus, along with opening act The So So Glos, did a rollicking cover of this tune, bringing the spirit of the original to life. To make the scene complete, they even dressed up in outfits similar to what the Beasties were wearing back in 1986. A great cover, and yet another reminder of ridiculously fun License To Ill is.




John Hugar
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Songbook Report: Titus Andronicus' Local Business


It’s probably important to look at Titus Andronicus’ third album, Local Business, in the context of their first two albums. Lead singer/songwriter Patrick Stickles might agree (see: “but what of the classic contest/ content vs. context/ they have a fight/ context wins” via “Still Life with Hot Deuce on a Silver Platter”).

Their first album, The Airing of the Grievances, found Stickles in his home state of New Jersey, young, serious, and angry, seemingly barely able to cope with the unending frustration that accompanies being young, serious, and angry. Their second album, The Monitor, which really couldn’t be accurately summarized by anything less than a novel, was essentially the story of Stickles leaving the “enemy” behind in New Jersey and seeking greener pastures in Boston.  The album follows an arc that eventually finds the narrator becoming disenchanted with his new home as well and realizing that the “enemy” is everywhere. The entire Civil War concept of the album is meant to highlight the fact that you can’t really avoid your enemy when it’s, literally, a part of your very essence. The album ends with a 14-mintue tirade, “The Battle of Hampton Roads,” with the narrator coming to understand that his worst struggles are internal, and deciding to return to New Jersey.

Local Business then, likely refers to unfinished “local” business on two levels: the problems of Stickles’s youth, haunting his hometown, that he had previously attempted to run away from rather than confront, and the most local business of all, the problems inside his own brain. It’s a fitting third act in that it sees Stickles finally coming to some resolution with respect to the issues raised in the band’s back-catalogue.

The album begins with three songs that, lyrically, pick up right where The Monitor left off. “Ecce Homo” starts off with Stickles seemingly commentating on the fruitlessness of his having railed against the ills of the world so enthusiastically on his prior album: “you can scream for a thousand years/ split the sky with a thousand curses/ to tell the evil that men do/ honey, you wouldn’t even scratch the surface.” “Ecce Homo” means ‘Behold the Man’ in Latin and is generally associated with paintings of Jesus being presented to the masses by Pontius Pilate prior to his crucifixion.  The song finds Stickles talking about himself in the third person, seemingly back in the metro-area and ready to crucify the previously identified internal enemy.

“Still Life with Hot Deuce on a Silver Platter” continues down this path with the narrator lamenting the pain of his youth, (“tonight I'm crying for a baby/ who's never going to be born/ my authentic self was aborted/ at the age of four”) and yearning for a way to turn it into something productive: “I’m not gonna cry/ thinking about that baby/ but I’m gonna die/ die if I don’t try/ to bring that man to life.” Stickles also calls back to “Four Score and Seven” from The Monitor when seven archangels found him spread across the floor. Here, however, the same angels “don’t come around no more.” Divine intervention has seemingly been counted out and self-help the only alternative left. 

This is followed up by “Upon Viewing Oregon’s Landscape with the Flood of Detritus,” which continues with the theme of struggling to transition from miserable self-hating youth to some level of maturity and self-acceptance. The Earth’s not going to wait for you to grow up and being a bitter old man is a lot less palatable than being a bitter young man:  “behold my brother's beautiful babies/ it's obvious to see/ the world's been making plans to go on without me” and “I gave my youth to yelling at rivers that refused to flood with angry tears.” The song itself is actually a send-up (possibly even mocking the immature severity) of a Titus Andronicus song from their first album: “Upon Viewing Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” seemingly lending further weight to the idea of fighting off one’s past self.


 Throughout these first three songs, Titus also picks up, musically, where their last album left off. They’re still playing crunchy, dramatic punk-rock with patriotic electric guitars and militant drums while someone in the background pounds on Springsteen’s piano and Stickles howls, rather non-melodically, non-stop for nearly 15 minutes. It’s a fitting way for Stickles to re-visit the youthful problems that he needs to confront: by couching them in the youthful music of the band’s past. This course continues into the mid-section of the album when we finally get the showdown we’ve been waiting for.

First, we hear “Food Fight!” a song that ends up being a bit of a good-bye to youth, immaturity, and the Titus Andronicus of old. The band plays their best impression of themselves while screaming out nothing other than “food fight,” a phrase, which at first seems to be a representation of a quintessential adolescent event, though it soon becomes apparent that there’s a double meaning involving the idea of “fighting with your food.” The song transitions into the album’s centerpiece “My Eating Disorder.” 

Here, Stickles finally confronts one of the major struggles of his life, his battle with Selective Eating Disorder. It’s a real (though extremely rare) thing, and it basically means you have a phobia of eating anything other than a select few foods. As one could imagine, it usually leaves you malnourished and rather unhappy. Stickles also references being medicated at an early age and apparently believing that it likely played a part in leading to his eating disorder and mental dissatisfaction. For all of that, however, the end of the song abruptly turns from Titus per usual into a borderline metallic dirge while Stickles announces: “my eating disorder/ it’s inside me” and then “spit it out.” There seems to finally be some level of acceptance here: he’s singing about this, he’s admitting it’s inside of him, and he’s “spitting it out” (a dark play on words between eating disorder verbiage and “finally admitting something.”)

The song is followed by “Titus Andronicus vs. The Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO),” a reference to the “Titus Andronicus” songs on the first two albums, and is a Stooges-style proto-punk song that blisters and says nothing other than “I’m going insane;” a final admission and catharsis before moving on to the final act.

The final four songs on the album see Titus Andronicus, maybe post-crucifixion, resurrected, and sounding, relatively, as mature as they ever have and, if nothing else, decidedly “not punk.”  “In a Big City,” “In a Small Body,” and “(I am the) Electric Man” feature guitars that jangle and, at some points, even “twang,” in a mutated country-hard rock shuffle, as if the band suddenly realized the Hold Steady’s shoes were getting cold. Stickles is actually “singing” here, especially on “In a Small Body” where he sounds practically melodic. Lyrically, he’s sounding positively confident. He’s living in New York and, while still by no means content, he’s seemingly come to some peace with his previous demons. See: “every cent I earned/ I spent/ and I would do it again”, “don’t tell me I was born free/ that joke has been old since high school.”

By the last song, “Tried to Quit Smoking,” he’s sounding as well adjusted and self-accepting as ever when he states: “what I did, I did/ who I am, I am/ then a stupid kid/ now a stupid man.” The album ends with Stickles stating that he “made his bed,” now he’s fucking “in it.” It’s a chance to play with the dual verb/adjective nature of “fuck” but it’s also a statement that once you find yourself in a situation, you might as well grow up and accept it. The band breaks out the harmonica and finishes the album with a four-minute blues jam that seems to indicate Titus Andronicus has finally beaten itself..





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Album Review: Titus Andronicus - Local Business


On their third release, despite threatening us throughout their victoriously venomous career, Titus Andronicus finally sound as deliriously absurd as they claim the universe they inhabit to be. While their raucous self-titled debut and ambitious conceptual Civil War epic The Monitor raged against the void with an ironic sense of purpose, a nihilistic manifesto so harsh and pronounced, so passionately and poetically expressed that the world of Titus Andronicus felt as if it had a point, even if front man Patrick Stickles howled that it didn’t.  On Local Business the New Jersey indie punks appear to have finally let out the oars. The album floats aimlessly on an absurd sea that never reaches land.

Though Stickles is as clever and crude as ever, viciously observing on “In a Small Body” that his “dick’s too short to fuck the whole world” before launching into a scatological rant, he hardly seems as desperate to revel in the twisted fullness of the human condition as in previous albums. Whereas The Monitor was unapologetically rousing and put drunken faith in its combative anthems, Local Business is too silly and lazy to take on its existential themes with the seriousness that The Monitor often employed.  It is a fun, old school punk record, but lacks the endearing vitality Titus Andronicus has delivered in the past.

The looseness and hollowness that accompanies Local Business does provide Stickles and company with space to expand their repertoire. Classic-rocker “(I Am) The Electric Man” finds Titus Andronicus mimicking The Rolling Stones with surprising success. On an album screaming with songs that sound stolen from The Sex Pistols and The Fall, however, the track feels misplaced with its smooth tunefulness and lyrical simplicity. Elsewhere, goofy throwaway numbers like “Food Fight!” and “Titus Andronicus v. the Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)” seem ill-advised even if they do convincingly convey how much Titus Andronicus just don’t care about anything anymore.

Stickles, marching boldly through his missteps, is still a brilliant writer and his broken snarl remains a perfect match for the abrasive music he unleashes. The mad apocalyptic prophet he at times presents himself as, echoing the robe-tearing lamenters of the Old Testament, appears again on “Upon Viewing Oregon’s Landscape with the Flood of Detritus,” bemoaning while backed by bouncy power chords, “one good kid smashed to splinters, another wicked one crowned king” and a youth spent “yelling at rivers that refused to flood with angry tears.” The juxtaposition between Stickles’ bitter angst and his joyous riff-spitting craftsmanship, disjointed in theory, somehow never feels contradictory.

It cannot be underemphasized how buoyant (in the British seventies punk sense) this take on the American teenage wasteland is, in spite of its dour lyrics. Titus Andronicus continue to generate sick-hearted pop music boasting addictive hooks energetic enough for even the toughest workout regimen. Local Business, more than any Titus Andronicus release thus far, nostalgically recalls a pre-Pro Tools rawness valuing exuberance over slickness, charging forth with uninhibited vigor. It may not be as cohesive or mesmerizing as Titus Andronicus or The Monitor but it is wonderfully wild if not intentionally directionless.

Stickles begins Local Business with the promising plunge into the philosophical of “Ecce Homo” and ends his freefall on “Tried to Quit Smoking” by diving into his own sheets, attempting to conquer his dissatisfaction by screwing it away. This finale may be a fair metaphor for the spirit of the entire album. With Local Business, Titus Andronicus sets out to do battle with life itself but only ends up fooling around.

Grade: B-



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