With thrash-and-burn riffs, shout-along rants, E Street Band-style blue-collar blues, and tin-can acoustics, these Jersey boys' debut album The Airing of Grievances burns all the way down from its big mouth to its black liver.
Each play of Grievances is like that triumphant, sweaty bar show, right there in your room.
The majority of the album is exactly what indie rock has been lacking for over a decade, and this is too crucial a release to get caught up in nitpicking.
It might have sucked the first time you went through it, but here, it couldn't sound better.
This sense of being aware of our own impending death leading to a heightened sense of life sums up perfectly The Airing of Grievances, an album that bemoans the past, shrugs it's shoulders and raises a glass to the future.
The Airing of Grievances deals heavily in the dark stuff. Even its few instances of humor are meant to be taken with a mournful shrug, not a wry smile.
The Airing is a shattering breakthrough: more than mere Arcade Fire sound-a-likes, Titus Andronicus are the latest and best band to take the existentialist who-gives-a-fuck baton and run with it.
The Airing Of Grievances is one of the smartest, most joyous records in an age, channelling the spirit of other too-clever-by-half suburban punks from The Replacements to Nirvana and adding a dash of felllow New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen's eye for detail.
Patrick Stickles screams and moans amid the swirling, lo-fi racket, and although he sounds a helluva lot like Conor Oberst, this is no Bright Eyes knockoff. The Airing of Grievances is more inviting, fraternal, and widely referential.
The Airing of Grievances isn't a perfect record by any means, but it is a lot of fun -- and if they can avoid cleaning up their sound too much and keep plugging away, they may come up with something great someday.
In total—and there is absolutely no other way to absorb this album; if it lets up it will lose itself—the sentiment is hostile, championing a mismatched, bitchy pile of allusions to alienation, dissatisfaction, and indifference that begs for attention and respect but is too passive to amount to anything but a wan wash.
Good on Titus naming themselves after Shakespeare and then getting into the head of any indie kid reading Shakespeare
#21 | / | Consequence of Sound |
#25 | / | Pitchfork |
#46 | / | No Ripcord |