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.
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.
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.
Of course The Most Lamentable Tragedy is ridiculous. It's also dumb, intelligent, heartbreaking and life-affirming.
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.
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 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.
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.
The album demands a lot from our short-attention-span culture, but it’s not time you’ll feel like you’ve wasted.
‘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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1 | The Angry Hour 1:43 | 50 |
2 | No Future Part IV : No Future Triumphant 4:55 | 72 |
3 | Stranded (On My Own) 4:25 | 65 |
4 | Lonely Boy 5:23 | 57 |
5 | I Lost My Mind 4:20 | 42 |
6 | Look Alive 0:35 |
7 | The Magic Morning 1:01 | |
8 | Lookalike 0:49 | 78 |
9 | I Lost My Mind 1:37 | 67 |
10 | Mr. E. Mann 3:50 | |
11 | Fired Up 4:06 | |
12 | Dimed Out 2:58 | |
13 | More Perfect Union 9:41 | |
14 | [Intermission] 1:18 |
1 | Sun Salutation 0:57 | |
2 | (S)HE SAID / (S)HE SAID 9:12 | |
3 | Funny Feeling 3:25 | |
4 | Fatal Flaw 3:29 | |
5 | Please 1:16 |
6 | Come On, Siobhán 3:45 | |
7 | A Pair of Brown Eyes 3:18 | |
8 | Auld Lang Syne 1:47 | |
9 | I'm Going Insane (Finish Him) 1:59 |
10 | The Fall 0:48 | |
11 | Into the Void (Filler) 4:38 | |
12 | No Future Part V: In Endless Dreaming 4:42 | |
13 | [Seven Seconds] 0:07 | |
14 | Stable Boy 6:53 | |
15 | A Moral 0:31 |
#8 | / | Slant Magazine |
#9 | / | Consequence of Sound |
#14 | / | The Skinny |
#15 | / | Diffuser |
#17 | / | Stereogum |
#24 | / | American Songwriter |
#24 | / | Time Out New York |
#25 | / | FasterLouder |
#26 | / | Treble |
#31 | / | No Ripcord |