On Titus Andronicus’ 2008 debut, the band begins the first song, the pummeling “Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ” with a washed-out, barely audible verse. One minute into the track, the music stops, and a chorus of pissed-off punks yells “fuck you” into an undistorted audio channel, their voices echoing without an ounce of irony or satire.
This tells you everything you need to know about Titus Andronicus: they’re earnest and unabashedly epic, and they couldn’t care less about conforming to the shoegaze-y standards of modern indie music. The Monitor, the New Jersey group’s new full-length, is a concept album based on the Civil War, and this theme is stretched as far as it can go. The band peppers their aggressive punk progressions with civil war poetry and refrains that sound like timeless bits of war propaganda (“Rally around the flag” or “The enemy is everywhere”). While the refrains can be a little much sometimes, they are intrinsic to The Monitor’s instant appeal: the album never shies away from empowering sing-a-long anthems, and it achieves a universalism that modern indie albums rarely strive for.
However, The Monitor is still impressively complex. Singer Patrick Stickles weaves various sub-themes into the loose Civil War narrative, and certain songs feature techniques that stray from the punk canon (most notably the atmospheric drones of “A Pot In Which to Piss”). The Monitor is the rare concept album that reaches a complexity beyond main narrative, a complexity that secures it as both fascinating and undauntedly original.
4 Stars
