titus andronicus- the moniter

Titus Andronicus

The Monitor

[XL]

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Hold Steady frontman Craig Finn appears on The Monitor as the voice of Walt Whitman, and his inclusion on the album is a fitting one. With their intricately wordy barroom sing-alongs, the Hold Steady, at their best, occupy some ideal middle ground between charged-up classic rock swagger and literary ambition. To the young people in Titus Andronicus, the Hold Steady are elder statesmen, and The Monitor is their attempt to equal their forefathers' classics.
Titus arrived more or less fully formed on 2008's The Airing of Grievances, playing their fists-up Jersey punk anthems as knotty, muffled fuck-yous. But The Monitor pushes everything onward and upward, past ambition and into something like insanity. The band tries out violins, pianos, horns, bleary folk interludes, gang-shout chants, an epic, multi-part, 14-minute finale, and a loony concept that messily marries a bad breakup to the American Civil War. But they do all this with verve and charm and confidence, anchoring their wanderings with 10-megaton chorus roars and riffs that sound like they've been around forever. Frontbeard Patrick Stickles bellows every lyric in a scraggly yowl, sounding like the world is crumbling around him and the only thing holding the sky up is the righteous noise from the band behind him. And all year, everywhere Stickles went, his monuments to personal desolation whipped up sweaty, joyous moshpits. To some kid somewhere, he's already an elder statesmen. --Tom Breihan