The Monitor by Titus Andronicus

Modern indie rock generally treats emotion as something that should be guarded or disguised. The Monitor does not subscribe to this viewpoint. On their second album, New Jersey's Titus Andronicus split the emotional atom with anthemic chants, rousing sing-alongs, celebrations of binge drinking, marathon song titles, broken-hearted duets, punked-up Irish jigs, and classic rock lyric-stealing. And through it all, they take subtlety out on the town, pour a fifth of whiskey down its throat, write insults on its face in permanent marker, and abandon it in the woods.

If I initially had any trouble figuring out exactly what to make of The Airing of Grievances, the 2008 debut by New Jersey blogosphere faves Titus Andronicus, it was only because the experience of listening to the record was so purely and deliriously pleasurable that it led me to distrust my own opinion of it a little. Arriving via a wave of hype in the digital sphere nearly a full year before getting a physical release in early 2009 (a potent example of underdog ambition having finally outpaced the creaky machinations of an increasingly lumbering industry), the album was most confusing for the number of contradictions it seemed to embrace. A band so exhibitionist in their literary tendencies to name themselves after Shakespeare’s earliest and bloodiest tragedy should not, for example, drop a Seinfeld reference as the title of their first album. Likewise, a band that bravely flaunts their pretentions with song titles like “Albert Camus” or “Upon Viewing Brueghel’s ‘Landscape With the Fall of Icarus’” should probably not populate said titles with the kind of angst-y, adolescent lyrical diatribes that lead yelper Patrick Stickles filled the album with, like the frantically scrawled journal pages of a moody high school kid who spends a little too much time alone in his bedroom.