Titus Andronicus
The Airing of Grievances
XL Recordings
By Jose Fritz
The Airing of Grievances actually appeared on my Top 10 of 2008 as it was previously released in January of 2008. I discovered the album late in the year and mourned a little bit that it was too late for me to write it up. They signed with XL Recordings late last year who are re-releasing the album this month. Sometimes things just work out like that.
In another 20 years it may come to pass that some teenagers actually believe that Titus Andronicus invented the rock anthem. Perhaps it’s true, but for now they are its newest progenitors and proselytizers.
I have driven great distances in my aging Mazda playing nothing but The Airing of Grievances over and over singing along shamelessly, even at stoplights. It’s an emotionally powerful record. On the first listen, I actually got tingles up my spine, shaky fingers, and that dark feeling like I’m being drawn back, apart from the world to suddenly be in the world but not of the world.
I wonder how many times in my life a new record by a new band will still be able to utterly blow my mind. As I get older, I get more cynical and callous. I’ll get more culturally disconnected. When I hear a record this powerful I relish it but also wonder if this will be the last one. Will this be the last record that is able to reach in and grab me by the heart?
Few other songs on the record reach those frenetic heights, but they find other strange recesses that are intense in their own right. Guitars fade back into hums to become nothing more than haunting alliteration above the words of Andrew Cedermark. Their anthemic heights exceed Andrew W.K. without the schmaltz. Their lulls vanish into haunting static and the arcane quoting of Camus. Are lower lows even possible by the hands of man?
Their lyrics ramble like deconstructed poetry. The line breaks are meaningless as the words run together, into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and those into short stories. Allow me to quote from their eponymous single:
“Throw my guitar down on the floor. No one cares what I've got to say anymore. I didn't come here to be damned with faint praise. I'll write my masterpiece some other day. (fuck everything and fuck me) I'm repeating myself again. Innovation, I leave to smarter men. Pretty melodies don't fall out of the air for me; I've got to steal them from somewhere, but it doesn't matter what you do or how hard you try. Now there's nothing left for me to do except die.”
They finish that particular song clapping rhythmically and chanting the words “Your life is over” a few hundred times with varying, but always frenzied emphasis. It’s what Oscar Wilde called “that sincerity thing.” It burns like molten lead in your fingers. You never recover from hearing a record like this; it colors the very idea of good forever afterward. I expect it will make my Top 10 of 2009 as well.
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