One night soon after we moved to Atlanta, I was hanging out at the Graveyard Tavern, killing time before a show. I picked up the local indie music magazine and read a review of a new album by a band called Titus Andronicus. As a history professor, I was both intrigued and mortified. It seemed audacious on so many fronts: they were named after Shakespeare’s most notoriously violent play, a punk band attempting a concept album about the Civil War.
Yes, that Civil War. The one with Stonewall Jackson and ironclads. It sounds like a recipe for a prog-ish, pretentious disaster, right?
The Monitor ended up being one of my favorite albums—one that I continually go back to and enjoy for its rage, anguish, grit, rawness, and ambition. In ten songs, the New Jersey-based band weaves in threads of Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Brown into a ragged, rampacious epic about a nation divided against itself. Titus’s debut effort, 2008’s The Airing of Grievances, was a more straightforwardly noisy punk affair, but The Monitor marries the band’s dissonant sound to an unabashed Springteenian streak. They update the pathos of the Boss’s deindustrialized New Jersey, but in a new, angrier, more nihilistic register. As Patrick Stickles screeches in one of the album’s best songs, “Tramps like us… BABY WE WERE BORN TO DIE!”
The album opens, almost unbelievably, with the recitation of a lengthy quote from Abraham Lincoln, in an old, creaky voice.
From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe and Asia could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio River or set a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. If destruction be our lot, we ourselves must be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men, we will live forever, or die by suicide.
As Lincoln suggests, only we can truly destroy ourselves—a thought that seems timelier and timelier these days. Then erupts “A More Perfect Union,” as much of a manifesto as Titus Andronicus has. Through seven ragged minutes, Stickles depicts a shabby Northeast full of hope and despair, invoking the Fung Wah bus, the Garden State Parkway, Jeff Davis hanging from a sour-apple tree:
I’m doing 70 on 17, 80 over 84
And I never let the Merritt Parkway magnetize me no more
Give me a brutal Somerville summer
Give me a cruel New England winter
Give me the great Pine Barrens
So I can see them turned into splinters
Notably, the song interpolates both “Born to Run” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” into one big noise. Titus mixes up New Jersey lore, American history, and Biblical imagery in a combustible melange, all with an anthemic angst clearly ripped from Bruce.