Titus Andronicus Forever

Pitchfork is so rarely right these days that the event becomes somewhat analogous to a total solar eclipse. People gather in fields and point in awe, knowing this is something that may never occur again in their lifetime. There are few bands about which Pitchfork is usually correct and they are, in no particular order: The Hold Steady, Jet, LCD Soundsystem, and Titus Andronicus (in case you’re wondering, Pitchfork correctly despises Jet, as most thinking people do).

Titus Andronicus, named for Shakespeare’s most Michael Bay-ish play (Bay doesn’t direct Shakespeare, thank goodness, but Julie Taymor put together a pretty good film version of Titus featuring Anthony Hopkins), is a band of literary punks from New Jersey who won all my affection for their bruising debut, The Airing of Grievances. That album was a lovely slice of existential outrage that came into my life right when I needed it. And now, Titus Andronicus is back with The Monitor, named not for an episode of Seinfeld but for a Civil War ship.

Though The Monitor has been reported as a “loose concept album” or something similar, I suggest you drop that expectation right away. The Monitor contains myriad references to the Civil War (including quotes from Honest Abe Lincoln) but what this album is really about, when you get down to it, is breaking up. Vocalist Patrick Stickles moved to Massachusetts for a girl, they broke up, and the result is The Monitor. But, because Stickles is intelligent (sorry, Blink-182, real punks read books), the album ends up being a perfect reflection of the current American political climate – The Monitor is as much about Stickles’s recent break up as it is about a country breaking up with itself, much like it did during the Civil War (of course, the South doesn’t seem to be inclined to secede from the union these days, although the Texas State Board of Education has been seceding from reason at an alarming rate). Standout track “Four Score and Seven” puts it as succinctly as anyone can: “After 10,000 years, it’s still us against them.” And “Titus Andronicus Forever,” repeats, in bouncing sing-along fashion, “The enemy is everywhere.”

And musically, The Monitor is a big, angry rock record, every bit as satisfying as its predecessor and then some. There are more honky-tonk pianos on this album (especially on “A Pot in Which to Piss”, which also ends with the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn reading some Walt Whitman), some bagpipes (including on the overlong album closer “The Battle of Hampton Roads”), and even a ballady duet with Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner (I still have some hopes that Wye Oak will end up being a good band. Titus Andronicus’s “To Old Friends and New” is one reason) that celebrates human contradiction with Stickles’s usual humor: “It’s all right, the way you piss and moan” gives way to “It’s all right, the way that you live.” But that’s not what I came to Titus Andronicus for; no, I want Stickles spitting venom and he doesn’t disappoint. On the second half of  “Four Score and Seven,” he howls, “I struggle and stammer until I’m up to my ears/ in miserable quote-unquote art” and then mentions that “humans treat humans like humans treat hogs.” The song ends with a chorus of “It’s still us against them” before ending on “and they’re winning.” The Monitor is nothing if not a battle cry of “Fuck Them,” whoever they are (we all choose our Them, though, don’t we?); it even calls on us to “rally ’round the flag” on album opener “A More Perfect Union”, a song which scores points for a winning Billy Bragg reference (“I never wanted to change the world/ but I’m looking for a New New Jersey”) and paraphrases fellow New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen with the less hopeful, “Tramps like us, baby, we were born to die.”

The reason The Monitor works as a breakup record is that, in a way that only Titus Andronicus can really do, it seems to sort of celebrate the disintegration of the relationship as a completely expected outcome. Stickles closes “Theme from Cheers”  by asking, “What the fuck was it for anyway?” Of course, Patrick Stickles isn’t pleased that his relationship ended, but he seems to find some affirmation in the destruction. If he can’t have true love, he can have some whiskey and a beer and yell out his anger with equal parts fury and humor (he makes a reference about “pissing into the void” at one point, which puts a smile on my face. If you piss long into an abyss, will the abyss piss into you?).

“The Battle of Hampton Roads,” though about seven minutes too long, is still a fitting closer for The Monitor. The titular boat was involved in the first ever battle between ironclad warships, but the battle was a messy stalemate, which seems to reflect Stickles’s worldview at the end of the album. If you want to live by some sense of values, Stickles warns, “Prepare to be told/ ‘That shit’s gay, dude’” and, if love is a battlefield, that battle is the Battle of Hampton Roads and no one wins. At at the end of the day, Stickles is “as much of an asshole as I’ve ever been” and to his enemy (presumably this recent ex, who might be perversely honored to have partially inspired such an epic album) he says, “I’ve done to you what you’ve done to me.”

Is The Monitor a bit pretentious, and doesn’t it run a dire risk of falling into melodrama? Yes and yes. How does it overcome those two not-insignificant obstacles? From what I can tell, Titus Andronicus does it by keeping their sense of  humor (Stickles claims every one of the rest of his days will be “a fart in the face of your idea of success”) and by rocking out with an impressively shambolic competence. The pounding drums, crunchy guitars, and swelling horns on The Monitor make it a triumphant rock record first and everything else it may or may not be second. Sometimes, you just need a beer and an excuse to yell and curse – for the second album in a row, Titus Andronicus has provided me with my preferred soundtrack for those times.

The Ego’s Last Stand

If you have read other reviews of the new Flaming Lips record, Embryonic, you might be worried. You might have read about how “experimental” Embryonic is and you might have thought, “Hey, wait a minute – isn’t ‘experimental’ the term critics use to try to praise something that is bad, but bad in a perversely interesting way?” And you’d be right to think that. But Embryonic is really not that big of a leap for the Flaming Lips to have made from At War with the Mystics. In fact, if you look at their entire 20-something year career, it’s kinda hard to pin down their sound anyway. But I’m speaking as a guy who actually owns their awesomely underrated early albums like In a Priest-Driven Ambulance and Hit to Death in the Future Head.

The Pitchfork kids like Embryonic, which shows some rare good taste on their part, but they try to praise the album by damning the Lips’ other recent works, as if Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and The Soft Bulletin aren’t skull-crackingly magnificent listens in their own right (or in anyone’s own right, for that matter. Who out there has listened to both of those albums and found them lacking in melodious mind-blowing beauty?). The P-forkers even try to scare off the non-hipster-douchebag crowd by comparing Embryonic favorably to the Lips’ real experimental album, Zaireeka. While Embryonic does some sonic stuff that you haven’t heard from the Lips before, I’ve always understood the Flaming Lips as the best band ever at trying stuff they’ve never tried before. They’re willing to fail in a way almost no other band is, and I think that’s why they fail so rarely (or never, really, by my count). Am I about to say that Embryonic is a noble failure? No. It’s actually an incredibly compelling, noisy, psychedelic rock record that gets more splendid with each listen. I literally hear something new every single time I listen to Embryonic. I’m listening to it on headphones as I write this and am having a very good time indeed.

Before I get too much into the nuts and bolts of why Embryonic is arguably the best rock album of the year, I want to take a second to discuss the Pitchfork modus operandi for a second. If you’re blessed enough to inhabit a universe wherein you don’t know what the hell Pitchfork is, I suggest you pop on over to http://pitchfork.com, read a couple of their reviews, and see for yourself the kind of pretentious douchebaggery that is their bread and butter. See, they can’t stand the idea that other people might like the music they like, so they find the most unlistenable shit on earth and sing its praises, practically daring us lowly peasants to like it. For instance, they love Wavves, a band rational people would like to stuff into the business end of a wood-chipper. But that’s the whole Pitchfork shtick. If a band becomes too well-known, they can kiss the Pitchfork-love goodbye (see My Morning Jacket for examples of this). Of course, every once in a while, Pitchfork can’t help but honestly love something that is unassailably awesome, like the Hold Steady. Or the Flaming Lips. But with Embryonic, the P-forkers seem to think they’ve found a Flaming Lips album that only an internet hipster can love. And they’re wrong. My fiance, known to those who know her as the absolute antithesis of the internet hipster, likes Embryonic. Because it’s weird. Point is, Pitchfork is always wrong – even when they’re right, they say it in a wrong sort of way. Except this one time, when they created what may actually be my favorite album review of all time. I never get tired of posting that link.

Anyway, let’s talk Embryonic. Thematically, it’s the same as every Flaming Lips album ever: good, evil, life, love, and death. The Lips like to talk about the big stuff and they do it better than most bands (sorry, 8th grade girls, but “Your Body Is a Wonderland” is not deep, big picture stuff. Nor is, I dunno, anything by Green Day), but there’s a new philosophical wrinkle running throughout Embryonic that I happen to like very much: it deals a lot with annihilating the ego, which is a subject I think is very worthy indeed. Perhaps that’s (partly) because I have a pretty huge, exceedingly healthy ego, and it gets me into mostly avoidable trouble. So a soundtrack for its demise is literally music to my ears.

Embryonic, then, is kind of an existential/psychological freak-out (on the moon? I don’t know why I wrote that, but it fits, dammit, and I’m keeping it), starting with “Convinced of the Hex,” a song whose female subject says, “‘You think there’s a system/ that controls and affects/ You see, I believe in nothing/ and you’re convinced of the hex’”, setting up another strong through-line for the album: there’s no reason we’re here except the reasons we make (“no one is ever really powerless,” Coyne sings on – naturally – “Powerless”), and the good or ill we do in the world is a matter of choice (the beautiful and sparse “If” turns on this point, that humans are evil but can be gentle “if they decide”). That might sound kinda depressing, but the Lips don’t squander their opportunity to point out how freeing it is to live in a universe governed by chaos, chemistry, and luck. “Powerless” could be said to be half of the centerpiece of the album, the other half being the splendiferous “The Ego’s Last Stand,” which explicitly addresses the shattering effect that honest perspective can have on your assumptions, set to the tune of a sinister bass lick and a sparse vocal that builds to an awesome, drum-propelled (props to the Lips for drafting drummer Kliph Scurlock as an official fourth Flaming Lip) noise orgy which must be the sound your ego makes when it’s being crushed under the weight of unfiltered awesomeness.

Does that sound new-agey and weird? Does it sound like spaced-out hippie bullshit? Or the bummingest bummer of all time? However my description of Embryonic strikes you, it says more about you and I than it ever could about the album (and, if we’re being honest with ourselves, we should admit that criticism always tells you more about the critic than what they’re critiquing). The truth is, I’ve spent the last week trying to figure out what to say about the new Flaming Lips album and, in the mean time, I’ve listened to it obsessively. I still can’t say anything that will make you like this album, but I’ll make a bet with you (and the goodish people at Pitchfork): I’m betting that, as weird as it may seem on the surface, if everyone who reads Bollocks! (that’s between 15 and 30 people, on average – this has increased from an average of 6 to 9 readers about  a year ago and I thank all of you, whoever you are, for that) listens to Embryonic all the way through at least one time, more people will like than not. And, if you’re like me (you poor bastard), you’ll find yourself wanting to listen to it with an almost alarming frequency.