Words by Courtney Gannon
Coming of age in the suburbs and having a cool older brother who hands you down highlighted copies of Camus creates the perfect storm of existentialism, mood swings, and something to be really pissed at (i.e., SUVs). I know this because I still have a Mead notebook documenting the whitewashed squall, mostly via poems that very transparently paraphrase Bright Eyes lyrics. Titus Andronicus present such aggrandized struggle in a significantly less embarrassing, actually sort of perfect mode– their first full-length album, The Airing of Grievances.
The record is introduced by “Fear and Loathing In Mahwah, NJ” which begins with acoustic guitar that continually laps into itself with waves of delay. The disaffected meandering of the first minute or so of the song is brutally interrupted by a scream of “FUCK YOU!” This scared the shit out of me. Eric Harm hurries the remainder of the track along with drum-fills that he handles like a bunch of rabbits who were also scared shitless and are trying to scramble out of his arms. They are energetic and tumbling, but he holds the bastards real tight and makes it all okay. The track ends with a monologue from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus written for a relentlessly awful character. It’s the sort of uncomplicated evil that youth imagines.
This creepiness is quickly punctuated by kick drum and is reconsidered by the thematically relevant “My Time Outside the Womb.” Placing this tune beside the last forces the acknowledgment of moral gradation. Even that unpleasant guy from Titus was a baby once, after all. Something happens. And the space between right and wrong can be as grey as the Jersey skyline.
Musically, too, Titus Andronicus climb from shoegaze to punk and then back down again, often with a graduated continuity so that you are only jarred by the generic shifts when the guys want you to be. In “No Future Pt. 2: The Days After No Future” the structured guitar and steadfast drumming drop out from underneath the song. What’s left is dream pop that sounds more like an impressionist trip to the planetarium than the abrasive expressionism elbowing its way through a lot of the album. Bass picks up and carries the song back to rock, which again dissolves into ambient fog and then gives up the ghost of Camus.
How this music can be both hellish and ethereal at the same time is beyond me, but it probably has something to do with Patrick Stickles’ voice, which sometimes is content as another instrument and other times insists on screaming its way to the front of the line. And on tracks like “Albert Camus” he manages to go from one to the other, halfway through. There’s something profoundly attractive this musical excitability.
The Airing of Grievances is what happens when your angst turns out to be warranted. Underlining Sartre while you’re waiting for your first mustache to come in can make you seem like a self-important weirdo at sixteen, but Titus Andronicus prove that it’s totally worth it when suddenly you can make Jersey epic, sensitivity militant, and can scream even more assuredly about how the world has gone to shit. Long live the literate punk (XL, 2009).
