Today, we begin our new recurring series, "Sonic Reducer." In the series, Punknews writers compress a band, genre, theme, or time period into a playlist that would fit on a single CD. Along with the playlist, you'll get either an overview of the topic, such as a band introduction, or a story about how the music in the playlist moved or changed the writer. This series is intended to be educational, giving you the listener an overview of a certain scene, as well as rockin'.
Today, we kick off with a Titus Andronicus playlist curated by Punknews writer Connor Crockford. You can hear it below and read his thoughts on the band.
Whispered words scrawled on a notebook page, sung by a young man on the edge of heartbreak, pain and anguish perhaps with everyone and everything. His voice is reedy and adenoidal and runs against an acoustic guitar. His brief folk song of frustration and pain is a common one, so he's finished. Until human voices wake us with “FUCK. YOU!†Then suddenly the song starts again, re-booting into a punk charger of resolve and exhilaration ®C even when Patrick Stickles is despairing, he's more able than ever to live, the ultimate punk existentialist.
Titus Andronicus is one of those bands that has always meant so much to me even when they're at their most hyper-conceptual and ambitious. I listened to “No Future ®C Part 1†as I left my semi-hated small town for college in the big city, screamed along to “Titus Andronicus†as I moshed with one of my best friends, and “Ecce Homo†soundtracked at least four or five melancholy/amazing bullshit weekends. If something like The Monitor in theory was too big and grandiose to go along with “Our band could be your lifeâ€, the holy-shit rousing melodies and squawked lyrics on all of these albums spoke differently. Titus owed as much to Bruce Springsteen as it does to Camus and that gives them a constant and terrible beauty, one that you automatically get when you're depressed as hell and “will always be a loser†but can look at a rose and feel totally overwhelmed by the wonder of the earth, even a godless one (Stickles may read his Bible for the vocab but it's unlikely he believes any of it).
And more than anything Titus shows us that you can still make rock and punk that believes in itself, that wants to go beyond it's limitations and make something powerful and real (whatever that means). Titus is putting out another album and what I've heard is fantastic, “Fatal Flaw†and “Dimed Out†like the running thoughts in my own head. What Titus did and is still doing is vital in a 90s revival indie rock world: suggesting musicians can still care, can tell their listener's stories, and feel miserable as all hell yet grateful just for the beauty of feeling anything. And make wild music doing it. -Connor Crockford