Titus Andronicus | The Monitor 10 Year Retrospective

Dillon

Dillon - The Monitor, Titus Andronicus’ albatross of a smash success album turned ten this year. Maybe it’s quarantine, maybe it’s the existential-dread that has taken hold of my mind as I hurdle forward toward the dreaded end of my 20s, maybe it’s a little of both, but I feel I’ve come to some clarity about how and why I’ve attached so much meaning to this album over the past decade. I know Stereogum’s done an excellent write up, retrospective, and deep dive on this album’s 10th birthday. I’m not here to explain this idiosyncratic indie icon, instead I just want to explain why it stuck with me. The other reason for doing this, obviously, is that Titus Andronicus is inarguably, in my mind at least, one of the most interesting and important rock bands to come out of the Garden State in my lifetime. 

The Monitor was kind of an ideal album for me at 17. It felt then like an album written specifically for an anxious, depressive, and generally unpleasant teenager on the cusp of adulthood getting ready to leave Long Island, at least partially, for college. The album somehow does this thing, that doesn’t feel like it should be possible, where it gets you to take seriously the idea that the internal struggles you face, your angst, your selfishness, your despair, your tendencies toward self-sabotage and -destruction are as weighty as the American Civil War. It does this, knowing that this metaphor is all-at-once completely ridiculous, but somehow it carries complete emotional truth for the listener. Or at least it felt like it did. In small part because everything else about the album, it’s instrumentation, production, the behemoth track times, the found audio recordings are all insanely weighty, big, larger than life itself. While the narrative through line and lyricism on display remain small, focused, relatable. I can’t tell you how many times I played “The Battle of Hampton Roads” while driving west on 84, but it’s a lot. It’s an album very much of a place and time and age, and if you were the crosshairs of all that at the time, it’s got this chaos-rune-type quality to it.Where you’re almost scared to talk about it with folks worrying what they’ll think of you for putting this much weight on a rock album. 

Now, this album effectively flavors and tints my nostalgia for those times. I still go back to Patrick Stickles and crew’s rollicking and despair laden driving ballads, and I still love this album as much as I did back then. Now, though, it gives perspective, for how big and unstable and uncertain the future felt in those moments. I recognize now that I have control over what I choose to become emotionally embattled over and this album has helped me get to some perspective. In short, I get to give my own answers to Patrick’s caustic questioning:

Is there a human alive ain't looked themselves in the face//Without winking or saying what they mean without drinking//Who will believe in something without thinking

"What if somebody doesn't approve?"//Is there a soul on this earth that isn't too frightened to move?