AMS Album of the Week 3

Titus Andronicus’ first twoalbums are both fantastic. An eclectic brand of lo-fi punk done with furious passion and intelligence. A key theme of Titus Andronicus’ lyrics is nihilism. You can look at the first two albums as the first two steps in accepting nihilism. First you get really pissed off, and then you have a bit of a cry. If we take Local Business, Titus Andronicus’ third album, as an extension of this, it turns out that the next step of coming to terms with nihilism is to become the Gaslight Anthem.

My reviews generally take the form introduction, positives, negatives and conclusion. Sadly I have absolutely nothing good to say about this album so I’m diving straight into the negatives. It’s straight up shit. The first album makes you want to get fucked up and throw yourself around a sweaty venue, the second makes you want to get fucked up and sit in a corner and sob. This one makes me want to go to the pub and have a quiet shandy, specifically without this on in the background. Patrick Stickles used to write clever lyrics with a knack for black humour and a heavy sense of irony. Now we’re treated to the lines “your dick’s too short to fuck the world”, “feeling like we live on diarrhoea planet” and a whole fucking song about being an electric man (he has everything but an electric van). The songs used to slot together whilst all having their own aesthetic. On this album the brief forays out of bad Hold Steady songs are just bizarre. The last few minutes of ‘My Eating Disorder’ is the sort of thing you imagine Kyuss might have found after a recording session where they took the stoner in stoner rock a bit too far. ‘Tried to Quit Smoking’ uses all the worst parts of The Pogues for nearly 10 minutes.

It’s clumsy, it’s crass and it’s certainly not clever. It’s bizarre that a band could go from being so vitriolic to being so unbelievably bland. It’s like they’re happy now, which might be great for them but it’s really ruined the band. This album sounds like Tenacious D ironically parodying Bruce Springsteen as Titus Andronicus. It is of course entirely possible that that is what they were going for, in which case they are all cunts. – Stuart Masson