Portrait of the Artist as Screw-up 1 comments

By Andy Whitman

In the classic coming-of-age novel, a callow youth ventures from his provincial town into the wider world, survives a series of adventures and misadventures, and emerges as a chastened but wiser young adult.

Leave it to a New Jersey punk to settle for two out of three.

The name of the New Jersey punk is Patrick Stickles, and he’s the lead singer and songwriter for a motley assembly of musicians called Titus Andronicus. The band name should tell you everything you need to know. The Shakespearian reference should indicate the literary pretensions of this unruly mob. And the fact that Titus Andronicus is Shakespeare’s most emotionally charged and gruesome play should tell you everything else. There’s something quintessentially punk about a play that features rape, decapitation, and cannibalism, and Stickles and his bandmates claim that legacy as their own. They revel in both the blood and the poetic beauty.

About that two-out-of-three reference: the latest Titus Andronicus album, called The Monitor, is a coming-of-age song cycle in which our intrepid young protagonist ventures forth into the wider world and emerges, apparently many months and many beers down the line, neither more mature nor more wise.

The journey takes him from the toxic swamps of New Jersey to a new start in Boston and then back again to those Jersey swamps. But he does not come of age. This is the musical equivalent of a bildungsroman in which the hero never grows up. In Patrick Stickles’ world, there is no quest, no shining vision on the horizon. The goal is simple escape. And there is no maturation, no painful but necessary education, and no gradual transformation into a better human being. There is only this:

So when I leave Boston, my tail is between my legs,
After deep cups of patience have been drunk to the dregs,
And now I’m heading west on 84 again,
And I’m as much of an asshole as I’ve ever been.
And there is still nothing about myself I respect
Still haven’t done anything I did not later regret.

How you react to that will, of course, vary greatly on your tolerance for profanity and self-absorbed introspection. But there is also a clear-eyed honesty and vulnerability there that I find quite bracing and welcome. There is some prodigious rock ‘n roll there, too, although the pixels can’t possibly communicate that. Stagnation may have never sounded so good.

And that’s at least partly because stagnation has never been presented with such ambition. If that sounds somewhat contradictory, welcome to the conflicted world of Titus Andronicus.

The Monitor is many things, most of them audacious and puzzling and contradictory. It is, for starters, a highly personal, confessional singer/songwriter album that also purports to be a concept album about the American Civil War. The album title refers to the legendary Union ironclad that battled the C.S.A. Merrimack in what was perhaps the most famous naval engagement in American history. Song titles include “Four Score and Seven,” “A More Perfect Union,” and “The Battle of Hampton Roads.”

Between-song snippets include prose and poetry recitations from the words of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman, and the lyrics reference Jefferson Davis and The Battle Hymn of the Republic. But in the midst of the overarching historical conceit, Stickles then quotes lyrics from contemporary songwriters Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen. And he dedicates a song to Cheers—yes, the ‘80s sitcom, not what the brave soldiers may have said to one another on the night before battle.

So much for narrative continuity.

The music is no less schizophrenic. The Monitor is a raging, spittle-flecked punk album on which bagpipes, trombones, and cellos are prominently featured, and which leaves ample room for honky-tonk piano and sax breaks and Celtic pub singalongs.

Confused yet? In short, this is a glorious mess of an album about mess, about untidy endings, about unresolved conflicts. It’s an album, I suspect, about a real life that is hopelessly convoluted, as real lives often tend to be, and it’s the most frustrating and exhilarating music I’ve heard in years.

In the end, I’m willing to overlook the inconsistencies and frustrations because the songwriting breathtakingly captures a conflicted life. If the execution can’t quite match the audacious vision (and it can’t), The Monitor nevertheless succeeds quite well when it portrays the civil war brewing within the skull of Patrick Stickles.

Stickles’ persona is angry, confused, fed up with the broken promise of the American Dream, despairing, drunken, cynical, engaged, disengaged, by turns blasé and passionate. Incoherency and inconsistency is the very point. He is all raw nerves, utterly unstable and unpredictable, utterly compelling as a songwriter and human being. He tells his tales of disillusion and dissolution, lashing out at anyone and everyone, but saving his most pointed barbs for himself. He has his literary precedents in this journey of debauched surrealism and black humor—Kerouac, Bukowski, Heller, Vonnegut—but seldom have these sentiments been portrayed so richly and three-dimensionally in song.

It’s the portrait of the artist as a young screwup, and if Stickles wants to cloak his misadventures in heroic threads and classic literary tropes, he’s hardly the first talented lout to view his life in mythic terms. It’s just more fun when the literary ambition is accompanied by a punk snarl.

The Monitor isn’t The Odyssey. It’s barely coherent storytelling. But it’s a journey to hell and back just the same, and it’s both ridiculously ambitious and wildly entertaining. Those of you who like Kerouac and Heller, not to mention Bruce Springsteen, The Pogues, and The Hold Steady, will enjoy it immensely.