When Titus Andronicus blew up in 2008, it was their lo-fi sound and literary references that endeared this New Jersey five-piece to hipsters of all stripes. They seemed like a decidedly cool band to like, and their off-kilter personalities and underground status made them an instant notch in the belt of indie kids everywhere.
With their new album “Monitor,” the band have become something decidedly different. Rather than a lit/hipster-rock band in the mold of so many others, Titus Andronicus have junked that lo-fi sound for a big, polished concept album. What is that concept?
The title of the album refers to the famous iron-clad warship Monitor, and the band claims that the piece is supposed to tell the story of the American Civil War. With song titles like “A More Perfect Union” and “The Battle of Hampton Roads,” and guest vocalists providing voices to read the words of important figures of the time — like some History Channel documentary — it seems that way on the surface.
Yet, the concept of this concept album is a lot more than that. On first listen, it’s clear that there are many other ideas circulating in this big, loud maelstrom. In the most recent issue of Spin Magazine, the band say the album conflates the battlegrounds of the Civil War with the losing battle to make love work in our modern world.
Sure, this kind of sounds ridiculous when you first hear it, but the more you listen to the album, the more you really think Titus are onto something. By the third or fourth listen, you are thoroughly convinced that love is in fact just like the Civil War, thank you very much.
Still, any attempt to really explain why that is will be met with frustration because this is not a concept album in the sense that we might generally think of the term. Good luck discerning any kind of real story from the whole thing (as you can with the messy “Hazards of Love,” the Decemberists’ most recent effort).
Instead, it might be wise to borrow a musical theater term to describe what exactly this is that Titus have created. Rather than calling this a concept album, one might think of it instead as a song cycle that is shaped by the idea of the Civil War (though it is certainly better than the atrocious and almost nonsensical Civil War song cycle Frank Wildhorn had going at Ford’s Theatre last year).
Ultimately this is an album of ideas. Of course, we typically think of an album of ideas as something political. Then again, try to remember the last time you listened to a political album and it actually convinced you of anything. My guess is that it probably has never happened. If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, a Tea Party anthem is not going to convince you to give up on Obama, and the same is true for conservatives.
Rather than anything like this, Titus Andronicus make the humble claim that the past is relevant to our present. The sound is immediate. The topic is approaching 150 years old, but when the punk guitar squalls give way to the voices of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln, it only seems natural. In fact, it’s hard not to feel inspired by the thing even though it stubbornly refuses to tell you what you ought to be inspired to do exactly.
In the end, that’s the beauty of this album. It does what the best art ought to do. It gets you thinking, but it doesn’t tell you what to think. I guarantee that if you listen to this album with someone else and then talk about what exactly it’s saying, you will have very different ideas. Other artists ought to take notice.
You can reach this columnist at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
