Coming out of a weekend is when we can hear all of the more spectacular aspects about Titus Andronicus, the New Jersey band that allows the golden, golden brown and brown liquids to influence the hell of out them. We can commiserate with the head-pounding and the racketeering that goes on when the good sense that was on its best behavior all week is neglected. It’s only fair to say that the good sense and sanity, the common niceties and behavior approved for mixed company don’t always have to be presentable. They can be ill-mannered and then, that’s where we get our own personal mythology, the folklore that will get passed on generation from generation. … [Story Continues Below]

First song
Upon Viewing Bruegel's Landscape With The Fall of Icarus (Titus Andronicus) [3.63MB] [1374 downloads]


— original version appears on The Airing of Grievances
This song is in the key of A major. It is in 4/4 time, and has a tempo of maybe 140 bpm or so. It is about a painting by this guy named Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who lived in the Netherlands during the sixteenth century. He is a very popular painter among indie rockers these days, as his work recently provided the cover for the Fleet Foxes album. The particular painting that this song is about was also the subject of poems by W.H. Auden and William Carlos Williams, the latter of those two being from New Jersey, much like Titus Andronicus. The title of this song is inspired by the poem “Upon First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats. Despite all this hoighty-toighty stuff, this is really just a regular rock and roll song. We often play this song first when we play our concerts.

Second song
No Future Pt. 1 (Titus Andronicus) [7.55MB] [1225 downloads]


— original version appears on The Airing of Grievances
This song is in G major, also in 4/4, and maybe about 80 bpm, a real dirge. This song was written while trying to recall how to play the guitar solo from “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd, of all things. “No Future” was the original title of “God Save The Queen” by the Sex Pistols, which I think is a much better title than “God Save The Queen,” personally. Their loss was my gain. This song is very miserable, to an almost ridiculous extent. I was recording a demo of it once in the performing arts building at the college I went to, and a girl came up and yelled at me because my guitar playing was interfering with the musical that was about to begin downstairs.

Third song
Fear & Loathing in Mahwah, NJ (Titus Andronicus) [4.88MB] [1244 downloads]


— original version appears on The Airing of Grievances
This song is in F Major, 4/4 time, and maybe 130 bpm or thereabouts. The first part of this song was an attempt to utilize that great drum beat that I came to love in songs like “Rebel Girl” and “I Am The Resurrection.” The second part of this song was written out of frustration at the song “Timorous Me” by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, because it has that great, jaunty, Irish-sounding melody at the end which is really begging for a proper galloping drumbeat, but always has some kind of John Bonham type beat instead, which is fine, but didn’t really suit my needs at the time. I always promised myself that if I ever wrote a song with such a melody, I would make sure that the drums were really galloping triumphantly. This song is about a guy I went to college with who I thought was my friend but turned out to be my enemy. We often play this song last at our concerts.

Fourth song
Waking Up Drunk (Titus Andronicus) [3.35MB] [1421 downloads]


– unreleased Spider Bags cover
This song is not by Titus Andronicus, but actually by a band from North Carolina called Spider Bags, who are the greatest band in the world. This song was on an album called A Celebration of Hunger,which was the best album of 2007 by a wide margin. That album has been unequaled by any album which came since, with the exception of the early mixes we have heard of the new Spider Bags album, Midnight Moving Skies, which is also profoundly amazing. It is staggering to me that Spider Bags are not exponentially more popular, since they are the greatest band in the world and everyone who hears them falls in love with them. We have played with this band quite a few times, and sometimes we have to play after them, at which point we in Titus Andronicus feel very embarrassed. Also, whenever we are in North Carolina, Dan McGee, who is the singer of Spider Bags, lets us stay at his house. Very gracious. Spider Bags are number one.

Exiting out of a two-day romp through lax responsibilities, late nights that in all likelihood led to debauchery or dreams of debauchery (or at the very least defacing of property or drunken stupors) and paying for it the next morning or mornings is at the core of what makes the group tick, or at least excites them into detailing matters. A story gets to the point where it’s worth retelling over and again when there’s some piece of it that borders on idiocy, nefariousness or poor judgment. We get to be where we are in life by making the mistakes we’ve made under the influence of alcohol, pounding ourselves into submission through a bender or three. These are the professors – these stints of overindulgence – that teach us that maybe bars are not the best places to find the person you’re going to marry, that too much of a good thing isn’t just a cliché for wieners to throw around as if they know something, that nothing good usually does happen after midnight and that sometimes it’s funny how little provocation it takes to decide it would be a hoot to throw a brick threw someone’s rearview window. We meet our enemies and our friends at the end of these nights and we rough them up for good or bad. The people we love get tested and we give ourselves a trying time. Titus Andronicus, named for the William Shakespeare tragedy that was known for its excessive gore and violence as a Roman general by that name seeks revenge on everyone he knows, gives us a good mind to either pop tops or twist them just to stay even with them so we can continue following along with the curvy, down on the floor romancing of sloppiness – unforgettable sloppiness like the stuff that The Replacements brought to the stage on many nights, the sloppiness of legend that feels like spittle on the sides of cheeks and glass in your forehead. They flatter us with brilliance in shaggy aloofness, trickling out Pavement-like unhingings and adding onto the sundae the kinds of poetry that come to the intelligent after three bottles of wine or whatever’s handy. There’s no pretension and no posturing, just the kind of townie special, the unglamorous things that people do when they’re not completely thinking straight. There – in that mind – we’re given the glimpse into bare bones and raw skin, into the unconscious stories that only need a little incentive to make their appearance. The band here plays a cover by North Carolina band the Spider Bags and it could be their anthem – their lost gem. It covers, more than anything else, the joy that waking up drunk brings them in correlation with the grief and pain in the ass-ed-ness that someone else brings them. There is no curfew on hard living in their poorly painted town and it goes down as evidence that there’s a void that they know how to fill appropriately. They take true substances for the real shadows that they find invading themselves regularly, with lead singer Patrick Stickles offering himself up as a guy lying down on the grill, walking across the coals and wailing through all of the things he’s feeling, hanging on by a thin thread, medicating the best way he knows.
 
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