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Peace

March 9th this monster is coming out, which is exciting news because if we you are anything like me and took their negativity in the documentary about them from last year seriously you might have worried that there would never be another Titus Andronicus record. Somethings which would have been a monumental shame.

The Airing of Grievances is a phenomenal record that manages to mix high brow (ish) references to Sartre and Camus with thrashing Bruce/punk music. Looks like they will not be looking back on this new one, since it is apparently a concept album that is at least obliquely about the Civil War (I’m game).

You can download the first single (which is in two parts because they plan on releasing it as a 7 inch in February but it’s too long to fit on one side) from Pitchfork. It’s good, really good. Maybe better than anything on The Airing of Grievances. Where TAOG sounded like a band who could barely contain all the ideas they had and how excited they were to be recording (not a bad thing) this new single (and hopefully the rest of the new album) sound like a newly confident band. Instead of immediately laying it all on the line and pounding it home as hard as possible, they let the song slowly climb to the (very satisfying) climax that doesn’t come until most songs would have packed it up and gone home. By the time Stickles starts chanting “It’s still us against them…”  I could barely contain my desire to fist pump/ anger that the album is not available right now/ excitement for seeing them live since this song lends itself to live scream-alongs better than anything this side of “Your life is over!”

Additionally, according to Pitchfork a whole slew of pretty awesome people are going to be contributing spoken word segments to this record. What’s more, apparently most of those people will be playing characters. The best one is of course Craig Finn reading as Walt Whitman. Let’s stop and think about two things: 1. How perfect it is that Craig Finn is doing Walt Whitman 2. How exciting it is that The Hold Steady may or may not be getting involved with Titus Andronicus. I would literally kill to see a bill that included both of those bands.

Better yet, think of this dream show: Bruce Springsteen, The Hold Steady, Titus Andronicus.

Let me leave you with the band’s own description of what the record is going to sound like because it surely does a better job than any reviewer is ever going to do:

“So what does all this sound like? It has long passages of ambient drones, blazing saxophone, pianos homages to “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” complete marching drumlines,Thunder Tube solos, fourteen-minute Billy Bragg knock-offs, backwards liturgical pieces, bombastic country duets, garbage cans hit with tambourines, choirs of angels with bromantic faces, probably too many spoken word interludes lifted from cassette tapes, and, of course, the hissy-fit punk songs, miserable, self-obsessed naval-gazing and off-key warbling we have come to expect from Titus Andronicus. With any luck, people won’t talk about this record in the context of the media-concocted “lo-fi” movement, since we went crazy (and broke) trying to perfect the sound of “hi-fi punk.”

Fast forward to about two minutes in for a ‘brootal’ break down, then it’s back to the auto tune. This truly makes no sense.

“We’re going to spank their butts until their noses bleed.”

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