Baby, we were born to die.
I haven’t been this excited about a band for a very long time.
The best part is, it was all a surreal accident.
It’s three weeks ago. 3 am. I’m hunched over my MacBook, staring at a blank page. Shoulders aching, beads of sweat sliding down my temples. Eyes dryer than my throat after the five coffees I’ve forced down it in the last two hours.
My degree demands that I write an essay on one of Shakespeare’s plays. So I decide to choose Titus Andronicus. I choose it partly because I’ve heard that it’s one of the most gruesome plays ever written, but mostly because it was the only play that I’d managed to read that semester.
But there’s a problem. I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing.
Where do I start?
I’ve been in this same position at my desk for several days now.
I feel the tears slowly start to build up. It’s only a matter of time before I start weeping uncontrollably all over my computer and break it as a result. In a last, desperate effort to get things off the ground, I pathetically type ‘Titus Andronicus’ into Google. I’m not sure what I’m hoping for – maybe Google have invented some kind of way to send documents through time and my finished essay will somehow appear in front of me. Obviously, this doesn’t happen, but something almost equally magical does: the first thing to appear is the Myspace address of a small indie band from New Jersey.
Oh yeah, I vaguely remember something about a band being called that. All right, ok, might as well put it on in the background, I’ll need all the help I can get. Open Spotify. Search Titus Andronicus. The Airing Of Grievances. Interesting. HANG ON. They have a song called ‘Albert Camus’ on that album. My girlfriend is writing her coursework on Albert Camus…MY coursework has a song about HER coursework…spooky…
After staring wide-eyed and terrified at my screen for a couple of minutes, I decide to click the play button.
I had been defibrillated.
Not only did I start and finish the essay that very night, I went out and bought Titus’s second album the Very. Next. Day.
I even ended up referencing them IN my essay. Seriously.
During the course of that night, I must have listened to The Airing Of Grievances (the band’s first album) 10 or 15 times. I couldn’t get enough. It was so endearingly abrasive – the slap in the face that I had desperately needed. But it was more than that too. The guitars may have been unrelenting and unspectacular, and the vocals may have been obnoxious and juvenile, but I just couldn’t get over the band’s earnestness. And their confidence shot out of my speakers like needles. It was exhilarating. By the time the album had reached its end, they had bled themselves dry.
Titus Andronicus have to be the most honest band I’ve ever heard. Their strength is that, although the guitar solos are quite infantile at times and the shrieked vocals are often jarring and discordant, there’s no doubt that they mean every single note they play with all their hearts. What’s more, they clearly have an ear for Spector-esque pop melody. True, they might not quite have the skill or equipment to execute it with any amount of slickness (it often sounds like it’s been recorded on a dictaphone), but this inevitably lends to their inescapable charm.
And they can be gentle and beautiful too. Yes, that’s right, they have it all. Both albums have a stand-out, gut-wrenchingly heartbreaking song - The Airing of Grievances’s ‘No Future’, and The Monitor’s ’To Old Friends and New’ are the respective albums’s eyes of the storm, providing soothing relief from the environing chaos. This contradiction, coupled with the meticulous songwriting, morph Titus Andronicus into a force to be reckoned with. The vocals may only vary from shrieks to whines, but on closer inspection the words being hurled at you are bars of gold, and you start to enjoy being pummelled by them. Existential angst and nihilism riddle Patrick Stickles’s lyrics, which are as poetic as they are intelligent, yet somehow they still manage to remain uplifting.
Titus Andronicus just point-blank refuse to do things anybody else’s way.
Their sheer ambition and arrogance is staggering. They have no respect for conventional song length, frequently churning out seven-minute epics. The Airing Of Grievances quotes and name-drops Shakespeare, Camus and Hunter S. Thompson, and its follow-up, The Monitor, not only unapologetically begins and ends with Springsteen references, but it’s a concept album about the American Civil War. A concept album. I think it even uses the war as a conceit for someone growing up in New Jersey. And I’m almost certain that it doesn’t work. But that’s why I love it. And that’s why I love them.
They’re the best at what they do. Which is, frankly, not giving a damn.
P.S. I’ve also recently got my hands on a copy of The Innocents Abroad – an 8 track 12” (limited to 300 copies) of a concert they played in London. With flawless covers of ‘Roadrunner’ and ‘Wipeout’, and a cool hand-stamped sleeve, it’s well worth looking out for.
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