Titus Andronicus
The Monitor

Go to New Jersey with a giant blender and throw in Jeff Mangus, Bright Eyes, Replacements, and Bruce Springsteen: what comes out should more or less resemble the second album by Titus Andronicus.

A year after their first, furious "The Airing Of Grievances", the band led by Patrick Stickles makes its way by elbowing, moshing, among the best groups of recent years, revealing their true intentions and real capabilities: ten tracks, ten bombs composing an ambitious concept album centered on the American Civil War, an extremely oversaturated theme but analyzed and synthesized through lyrics far from any rhetoric or banality screamed at full volume over a bed of guitars.

A catharsis of lost and refound humanity that goes through power ballads, punk rock anthems, and epic suites of distortions and twisted country marked by frenetic rhythms or military marches.

Abraham Lincoln's words that open the album sound like a manifesto of intentions (“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher”): we're a punk band, stripped of stereotypes and disguised as American superheroes. It kicks off with the ride of A More Perfect Union, an easy and engaging listen, but with its rhythm changes, it well introduces the album's atmospheres, moving to the nearly two minutes of pure energy in Titus Andronicus Forever, a hammering punk anthem with the obsessive cry of “The enemy is everywhere!” complete with a mini guitar solo that sounds much like a mockery.

The next two tracks prepare the listener for the album's true core: No Future Part III picks up the conversation left in the band's previous work (No Future Part I and No Future Part II, that is, the best from the previous album) highlighting the continuity in the evolution of the band's sound, while Richard II brings us back to the new forms with drum beats. Two excellent pieces if extracted from the context, but they become almost mere fillers when compared to A Pot In Which To Piss, the album's best song that, among melodies and arrangement, achieves a formal perfection summarizing the entire "The Monitor". The guitar crescendo in off-beat and the piano passage at 5:00 (the trill seems sampled from Ray Charles) are the most genius forty seconds of the album, creating a clear divide between the “before” and the “after”, through which everything is elevated to a higher plane: this moment confirms that it is not merely the duration of the tracks that has expanded compared to "The Airing Of Grievances", but that we are facing a more mature and complete project.

From here on, you are captivated.

Four Score And Seven inaugurates the second half of the album with a solemn stride that explodes into a lo-fi burst of trumpets and bagpipes, eight minutes filled with everything, three-quarter power, speed, and poetry in the lyrics.

Theme from Cheers, the only entirely “cheerful” track that literally entertains with its final guitar party. As unique on the album is also To Old Friends And New, the only slow song among the ten, sung by guitarist Amy Klein (who left the band shortly after completing the recordings) leading us by the hand to the parodic moment of … And Ever, a lo-fi reprise of Titus Andronicus Forever, transformed into a frenzied boogie thanks to the addition of piano and sax.

Once again, Lincoln's words introduce the final suite, The Battle Of Hampton Roads, an unending track that is a prayer, a battlefield, and a love song, all concluded with an epic yet, it must be said, overabundant instrumental closure.

The proof that pure melody can be made without being banal is here, in front of everyone's eyes.

Titus Andronicus pass the second album hurdle with flying colors, a stumbling block for countless artists who, after convincing debuts, let themselves be dragged by the frenzy of producing at all costs just to stay in the spotlight, often sacrificing quality.

They emancipate from what was not banality, but rather the raw nature of previous compositions, maintaining their nervous and impetuous core, taming the fury and rounding the edges to erect walls of sound enclosing a broadly conceived work that shines from almost every perspective: a courageous, mature and complete record that gives hope for the future of a potential new flagship of properly called American rock.