The Most Lamentable Tragedy

Titus Andronicus - The Most Lamentable Tragedy
Critic Score
Based on 33 reviews
2015 Ratings: #108 / 1021
User Score
Based on 225 ratings
2015 Rank: #270
Liked by 3 people
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CRITIC REVIEWS

100
Tiny Mix Tapes

The Most Lamentable Tragedy is the first alchemical punk rock opera. It is one angle of the story of humanity’s trying to know and live with itself, a portrait of mental illness reborn as a fable, a fantasy of just learning to live.

100
Consequence of Sound
This is music that wants to be read as a text, and deserves to be. The fact that it comes to us in an era of smartphones and shortening attention spans only serves to underscore its audacity.
91
Paste
There are Hüsker Dü hardcore punk blasts, Thin Lizzy dueling guitars, Elvis Costello wordplays-and-whimsies, Bruce Springsteen hopeful grandiosities—and Titus Andronicus is capable of making all of them sound like they came up with all this stuff first.
91
Pretty Much Amazing

No, TMLT is not as precise as The Monitor, nor as pleasurable. It does, however, surpass it in imagination and aim. This alone cements The Most Lamentable Tragedy as one of this year’s greatest rock records.

90
Drowned in Sound
For Patrick Stickles, his most inventive method of dealing with demons has manifested in the form of a 29-song, 93-minute rock opera concerning, life, love, the pursuit of happiness and - but of course - the harsh inevitability of death.
90
Uncut

The Most Lamentable Tragedy feels like a quintessentially modern album, a scintillating examination of mania and neurosis that uses the history of rock’n’roll as mere stage dressing for its bravura performance.

90
Exclaim!
An album with no filler is pretty rare in an era where a four-song EP usually has a throwaway track. That a monster like this is actually economical — all muscle, no fat — is like finding a unicorn.
90
The Line of Best Fit

Of course The Most Lamentable Tragedy is ridiculous. It's also dumb, intelligent, heartbreaking and life-affirming.

90
Sputnikmusic

The Most Lamentable Tragedy takes all of the band’s pent up rage and just lets it fly. It’s Titus Andronicus at their most liberated, and it bursts forth with a kind of energy that could have only emanated from a band that has accomplished everything that it wants to, and resultantly no longer gives a fuck.

90
The 405
Calling this an album falls short of the mark. It's a musical representation of a story, sure, but it's also an exploration of psycho-therapy, city living, Hamlet, Mother Nature, and the state of rock and roll at large.
83
A.V. Club
You can hear, see, feel Titus Andronicus trying their damnedest, and when the band’s talented musicians aren’t interrupted for the sake of concept, that enthusiasm and the resulting excellent songs pass infectiously to the listener.
81
Pitchfork

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.

80
No Ripcord

The Most Lamentable Tragedy presents an abstracted story as its emotional core, and it’s significantly harder to respond to that more distant lyrical perspective. Taken on its own, however, the album is one of the more compassionate, prideful and ultimately moving depictions of mental illness on record in recent years.

80
NOW Magazine

At 93 minutes, Titus Andronicus's latest may scare off those who believe punk rock should be compartmentalized into accessible pieces. There's not much that's accessible about The Most Lamentable Tragedy, but that's a good thing.

80
AllMusic
The whole of this album is truly more than the sum of the parts, and the parts are quite strong in and of themselves.
80
Clash
Sad, contemplative and euphoric in equal measure, 'The Most Lamentable Tragedy' is a true triumph.
80
Alternative Press

The album demands a lot from our short-attention-span culture, but it’s not time you’ll feel like you’ve wasted.

80
Loud and Quiet

‘The Most Lamentable Tragedy’ is a vaguely magical realist concept album. It’s conceptually rich but Patrick Stickles writes lyrics that can seem superficially blunt and uncomfortably self-pitying.

80
The Skinny
What could have easily been an exercise in pretension is instead filtered through the appealing mediums of heartland rock and Jersey basement punk.
80
SPIN

Where The Monitor was a punk rock Born to Run for a different generation, full of sprawling “Jungleland” revamps, The Most Lamentable Tragedy is an epic of different means. It’s comprised of the punchiest, most direct songs this band has yet unleashed.

80
Under the Radar

The Most Lamentable Tragedy is never less than interesting and rarely less than thrilling. If this turns out to be Titus Andronicus' final album, as Stickles has hinted, it's a great way to go out in a blaze of glory.

70
Rolling Stone
New Jersey rock & roll believers Titus Andronicus get top mileage from a simple idea: baiting hardcore thrust with classic-rock hooks.
70
NME
A few indulgences like an ‘Auld Lang Syne’ singalong are the main gripes to dampen an otherwise monumental presence.
70
PopMatters

A massive, sprawling mess of styles and genres, all rooted in Stickles’ wordy lyrical catharsis, Tragedy reflects the wild mood swings associated with those suffering from bipolar disorder; raging one moment, euphoric the next before settling into a seemingly bottomless depression.

60
The Guardian

You don’t have to have a particularly short attention span to find its sheer length wearying. While everything clearly has its place in Stickles’ scheme of things, a more detached observer could happily lose at least half an hour of music from The Most Lamentable Tragedy.

40
DIY
Ambition doesn’t always equal perfection. Rock operas have their place, but this isn’t the pick of the bunch.
40
The Needle Drop
New Jersey's Titus Andronicus are back with a 90-minute concept album.
Timbo
89

Long, messy, flawed to no end. But as an epic, TMLT works.

osterello
79

A modern rock opera. God save New Jersey!

100

Best album of the year. Period

Timbo
89

Long, messy, flawed to no end. But as an epic, TMLT works.

Indiefermag
90

Cuarto disco de la banda de Patrick Stickles, pluriempleado aquí en labores de producción y director de sus propios videoclips. The Most Lamentable Tragedy” es una auténtica ópera rock de las que hoy en día no se realizan. Aunque, todo sea dicho, tiene tanto de rock como de punk, porque no lo pueden evitar, y viendo su trayectoria, es difícil hacerlos contenerse. Ni falta que hace.

BuffaloStaple
59

cool concept and stuff, but fr fuck this dude's voice

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Track List

Act I: Set Aside or Miserable and Water-Buried
1The Angry Hour
1:43
50
2No Future Part IV : No Future Triumphant
4:55
72
3Stranded (On My Own)
4:25
65
4Lonely Boy
5:23
57
5I Lost My Mind
4:20
42
6Look Alive
0:35
Act II: Beside Himself
7The Magic Morning
1:01
8Lookalike
0:49
78
9I Lost My Mind
1:37
67
10Mr. E. Mann
3:50
11Fired Up
4:06
12Dimed Out
2:58
13More Perfect Union
9:41
14[Intermission]
1:18
Act III: Down by the Seaside
1Sun Salutation
0:57
2(S)HE SAID / (S)HE SAID
9:12
3Funny Feeling
3:25
4Fatal Flaw
3:29
5Please
1:16
Act IV: The Other Side or a Midsummer Night's Dream
6Come On, Siobhán
3:45
7A Pair of Brown Eyes
3:18
8Auld Lang Syne
1:47
9I'm Going Insane (Finish Him)
1:59
Act V: Decide
10The Fall
0:48
11Into the Void (Filler)
4:38
12No Future Part V: In Endless Dreaming
4:42
13[Seven Seconds]
0:07
14Stable Boy
6:53
15A Moral
0:31
Total Length: 1 hour, 33 minutes
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Added on: April 30, 2015