Release Date: October 23rd, 2012
It’s hard to imagine that, two years down the road and listening to Local Business, Titus Andronicus’ 2010 masterwork The Monitor would sound positively pretty. Yet there’s that beautiful reverb backing up “A Pot in Which to Piss,” or the entirety of “To Old Friends And New.” It’s all gorgeous in construction and execution, the culmination of a conceptual framework working within the confines of a resurgent genre (punk-rock, after all). Spending over an hour with singer Patrick Stickles barking metaphor about the Civil War sounds about as taxing as it isn’t.
In a sense, that is why Local Business was the only way for Titus Andronicus to take their third record. Comparatively short (49 minutes, still longer than Airing of Grievances), devoid of deranged-come-brilliant concept and brashly unadorned, Local Business is a direct descendant of Stickles’ growing cache in the punk community. It also carefully distills exactly what live audiences have always seen in the band – they’re basically The Replacements playing Springsteen covers.
There’s a tradeoff to the stark tonal difference between The Monitor and Local Business. The last three minutes of “Pot In Which To Piss” are destructive beauty at its most pristine while still managing to work in “urine and excrement.” Local Business is still a close at hand, visceral experience, yet much less overtly dramatic, content to let Stickles roll over his words with impressive velocity while keeping the backbeat from overpowering the proceedings. The most dramatic results come from the “In a Big City/Small Body” couplet, but after a few listens there’s a clear reason – Owen Pallett plays violin just under the guitar track. It adds a few extra pounds to cuts that Local Business can sometimes need, as the songs can sometimes lack dramatic heft.
That lack of heft isn’t a bad thing, by any means, and actually liberates Titus to make rambling rock blasts that will undoubtedly play fantastically live. The first quartet sprints through Stickles’ crammed notebook with little regard for literal lyrical clarity, focusing purely on how propulsive and forceful the band can make their five-piece sound. This also makes the lyrics more of a buried treasure – if you’re lucky enough the first time through you’ll hear one of Stickles’ sweetest lines: “behold my brother’s beautiful baby/ it’s obvious to see/ the world’s been makin’ plans to go on without me.”
Were the record a full-bore blast of neo-punk energy, Local Business might feel more like an exercise. Yet the last three tracks significantly expand Titus’ rock n’ roll vocabulary. “In A Small Body” drifts on the precipice of pop-rock while diatribing about the nature of free will. “I Tried to Quit Smoking” is a roughshod expansion of “To Old Friends And New,” only with a far more sinister closing line – “I was screaming kill, kill, kill, Ronald Reagan.” Then, most magnificently, “(I Am The) Electric Man” is pure E Street jam fare, an effervescent, light-hearted piano-driven thesis on exactly why Titus Andronicus aren’t just idiot kids playing punk music. Stickles’ lyrical dexterity is expanding too, but the most important quality here is how close he is screaming them to you.
The proximity into which Patrick Stickles draws you with his lyrics, more than anything else, is what keeps Titus Andronicus from falling back to the pack. It’s easy to mistake such intimacy for a Conor Oberstian clamor for importance, but Local Business is so viciously nihilistic that its tough to tell if Stickles is talking to you or himself throughout the record. There are impossibly gruesome screams into a pillow (“My Eating Disorder”), sardonic, sometimes outright mean spirited speeches that touch on the impossibility of anyone to make an effect on earth (“Upon Viewing Oregon’s Landscape With the Flood of Detritus”). The impossibly alliterative breakdown in “Hot Deuce” somehow forms a destructive, sorrowful narrative about the inevitability for all men to remain true. And then there are the jokes. Dismiss “Food Fight” and “Titus Andronicus Vs. The Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)” at your own peril. There’s a sequential reason why they go respectively before and after “Eating Disorder.” Titus songs may sound like parties, but they are so jam packed with complex ideals that, were they read properly, accurately anoint Stickles as a forebear of the punk movement he’s growing from Shea Stadium BK.
Stickles never allows himself much time to breathe and appreciate his intelligent verbosity, and that has sometimes made Titus lyrics hard to decipher through Stickles’ spitfire yowl. But that difficulty, the necessity for fans to either buy into the product or not fully understand the Local Business pathos, is what ultimately makes the record so rewarding in its relative slightness. It’s not the titanic weight of The Monitor. It’s not even the youthful irreverence of Airing of Grievances. Titus have moved on to the next phase, and Local Business is exactly what fans need to be able to understand the complex friendship that exists between Patrick Stickles, his listeners and his band, rapidly becoming an elite rock outfit.
Titus Andronicus – Local Business tracklist:
- “Ecce Homo”
- “Still Life With Hot Deuce on Silver Platter”
- “Upon Viewing Oregon’s Landscape With the Flood of Detritus”
- “Food Fight”
- “My Eating Disorder”
- “Titus Andronicus Vs. The Absurd World (3rd Round KO)”
- “In a Big City”
- “In a Small Body”
- “(I Am The) Electric Man”
- “I Tried to Quit Smoking”
