If you've been to Brooklyn venue Shea Stadium in the last few years, you might have encountered Patrick Stickles sitting at the door, selling tickets to shows with crowds far more diminished than those drawn by his band, Titus Andronicus. Such remember-your-roots DIY ethos has always been central to the band’s existence, because at a time when bands are more flexible than ever about taking money to survive, Titus Andronicus are specifically beloved for their refusal to compromise. They start charity funds so their music can be kept out of advertisements; they snidely refer to Kendrick Lamar as a shoe spokesperson, an attitude both rigidly simplistic and technically true.
The Clash were hyped as the "only band that matters," a dubious claim because it was invented by their record label. But for their fans, Titus Andronicus is this type of group. They turn a great, burning eye upon the world and spare no one from their observations, not even themselves. For listeners attracted to rock'n'roll as both flagellating whip and eternal flame, this is powerfully enticing—especially if you also believe the world is on the perennial edge of collapse. (Ironically, they take a similarly analytical approach to the ugliness in themselves and in the world as Kendrick Lamar—only, of course, they'd never sell any shoes.)
Their status was cemented by 2010 breakthrough The Monitor, a wildly ambitious album that used the Civil War as a metaphor for Stickles' life. It was desperate music made for desperate people, filled with howled lamentations about the sorry state of society wrapped around riffs that forced your shoulders out of their sockets. But the follow-up, 2012's Local Business, was unexpectedly dour. Hesitant to accept his band's new position in the music industry, Stickles pulled back. The first line asserted that everything in the world was "inherently worthless," and only grew more precisely negative as it went onward, critiquing the middle-class bubble that allowed a band like them to exist. Music fans will accept a certain amount of doom-and-gloom—many times they actively court it—but there are limits. Few people want to listen to a rock song about why listening to a rock song is bad. That Stickles spent the next few years telling his Twitter followers that Local Business was better than The Monitor (in a run of tweets now gone after he deleted his timeline earlier this year) seemed to cement its status as metaphorical garlic, meant to ward off the punks-in-name-only who today might discover the band through listening to Beats 1.
So when reports first emerged that the band was writing a 30-track rock opera, it sounded outrageous—a pointed gag from Stickles that would probably culminate in, like, an album full of Crass covers. How do you go bigger than an album that uses the Civil War as a metaphor for one's life? But it wasn't a joke: Almost two years later, they announced The Most Lamentable Tragedy, a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that immediately restored their claims to outsized ambition, as only a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera might.
The Most Lamentable Tragedy is a story told in five acts that follows the Hero, an unnamed man (who's someone like Stickles) in an unnamed city (which is somewhere like New York) grappling with his neuroses. He's confronted by his doppelgänger—an alternate self that seems to have everything figured out, and pushes him to find solace outside of sin. It’s a protracted allegory for manic depression, which Stickles has publicly struggled with since the band first came to attention. Here, he’s reversed course from the literal transcription of his life’s struggles on Local Business (no "My Eating Disorder"), instead interpreting them to fit his larger vision. The Most Lamentable Tragedy is their least specific album—no granular references to obscure Jersey baseball teams—but their most universal, less dependent on empathizing with the suburban sad sack.
The music encompasses everything they’ve ever sounded like: There are knotty guitar anthems filled with chords like power lines thrumming with electricity ("No Future Part IV", "Stranded"), hot-breathed hardcore exhortations ("Look Alive", "Lookalike"), vamps on musical theater where Stickles sounds somewhere between Billy Joel and Meat Loaf ("I Lost My Mind", "No Future Part V"). They filter the visceral riffage of Thin Lizzy ("Lonely Boy"), the all-hands-on revelry of the E. Street Band ("Fatal Flaw"), and the whiskey-soaked romanticism of the Pogues ("Come On, Siobhán") through a fiery, punk-indebted perspective. True, those are reference points on previous albums, but here the elements blend together like a hearty soup. Fifteen musicians are credited on the record (such as Owen Pallett, who handled the strings) and there's a feeling of camaraderie in the production; at times, it feels like the album was recorded in one, rambling live take over a long night.
The album’s ambitions aren’t only limited to the story, which Stickles has eagerly detailed at the former Rap Genius. Instead, it considers their discography as one giant super-structure. It's packed with callbacks to previous work, which any modest Titus head should be able to pick out. The references range from obvious ("More Perfect Union" follows The Monitor's "A More Perfect Union"; "I'm Going Insane" is a reprise of Local Business' "Titus Andronicus vs. the Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)") to esoteric (lyrical homages to "No Future" and "A More Perfect Union", amongst others) to potentially meaningful: The titular character in "Mr. E. Mann" is the "Electric Man" from Local Business, which was written about a real-life incident in which Stickles was hospitalized after gripping a live microphone during rehearsal for a show.
The idea that electricity and electroshock therapy can cure depression is an old one, hence the smudging of fiction and reality to suggest that the shocks Stickles inadvertently received may have created this fictive doppelganger, who appears to the hero ("I met a mystery man/ On a magic morning") and offers a hopeful path toward clean living. Of course, these layers of potential interpretation are secondary to the fact that "Mr. E. Mann" is simply an enjoyable song, guided by Stickles' sensitive vocal performance and the convergence of harmonica, piano, and strings into what sounds like glistening dew on that magic morning. You don’t need to know that Stickles was shocked by a microphone to enjoy "Mr. E Mann", just as you don’t need to know that he’s from New Jersey to understand the hero's sense of psychic isolation. But like the Hold Steady, the mythology offers deeper enjoyment for anyone willing to burrow into it.
On their earlier albums, Titus Andronicus perfected the art of writing confrontationally self-effacing anthems. Their most potent and most recognized refrains—"You will always be a loser" and "Your life is over"—took on a therapeutic nature when being screamed by crowds of young men and women in the throes of rock-show-as-catharsis. By contrast, the mantras on The Most Lamentable Tragedy look inward. "I hate to be awake"; "I can control something inside of me"; "It's alright"; "I only like it when it's dimed out"; these are confessional observations that sound scribbled in the margins of some diary. Stickles has sounded more personal than this, but never less acidic. This is angst that’s approachable, rather than the starved nihilism that colored their previous records.
With that in mind, the one-two punch of "Come On, Siobhán" and "A Pair of Brown Eyes" is where the record unlocks. In their cover of the Pogues classic, they tweak a few lyrics to change the mood: "One winter's evening/ Stoned as hell." It's marijuana that the hero consumes in this version, not alcohol, because while booze dulls the senses, a real marijuana high makes one ultra-perceptive of all the conditions in one's life. Sifting those thoughts to find some clarity is like navigating a minefield... but here, the hero has a revelation that despite his baleful world view, despite the push and pull between his inner selves, despite the tide of disgust felt toward his surroundings, salvation is possible through someone else. The feeling might be as ephemeral as the high, but for a moment, life looks wide open. It's the first time the band has explicitly sung about love, the transmutation of brutal pessimism into beatific optimism.
This is not maudlin sentiment printed off a Hallmark card, but a hard-fought conclusion following a lifetime of despair. The feeling isn't eternal; a few songs later, the relationship has ended and the hero is plunged back into his depression. But the mood has shifted by "Stable Boy", the last proper song on the album. Over a weeping chord organ, Stickles gazes at the yawning void of "forever" and decides that for all life's dissatisfaction, 'tis better to have lived than not at all.
"Stable Boy" was recorded with the same cassette recorder used for "Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ", the first song off their first record, which captured Stickles' need to do wrong to everyone who'd done wrong by him. The two tracks sound like bookends to the Titus Andronicus project, introducing and resolving Stickles' profound anxieties about life—the running theme through all of their four albums. It's not necessarily a happy ending, but it's one they fought for. And so: It's taken five years, but they've finally answered the grand expectations created by The Monitor. They could go anywhere from here—record that album of Crass covers, become a full-time bar cover band, or even happily break up. At the very least, they can stop writing songs titled "No Future".
