Titus Andronicus
The Bootleg; Los Angeles, CA

“That’s just how people dance to punk rock music,” Patrick Stickles tried to explain to The Bootleg’s staff. “What happened?” He asked. “We were dancing and having a good time and it was OK and then it wasn’t OK. Well, it’s OK by us but I can’t speak for theater.” Bouncers had just broken up what was a pretty mild group of slam dancers and it was beginning to look like The Bootleg was under the ownership of puritans. While Stickles’ singing often invites comparisons to Conor Oberst when he’s lamenting the fact that people don’t speak Spanish as Desaparecidos, when speaking, he sounds cool and collected. Tension would build between slam dancers and bouncers over the next couple of songs and result in one guy getting dragged out kicking and screaming.

But Titus Andronicus wouldn’t comment on it again. I was initially quite upset about the fact that someone could have been carried out of the show, and I was bummed that from that point on the bouncers were dispersed throughout in order to quell any bursts of movement. As someone not immediately affected (it’s kind of hard to take notes while getting shoved around), I realized that my feelings were based on a preconception and that Titus Andronicus and those dancers had a more flexible and admirable understanding of a punk-rock show. “Who cares that I can’t slam into my buddy,” they said. “I am listening to the best sound quality given to a punk band that Thomas Dunlap has ever heard. While most bands can barely carry anything longer than a half-hour set, Titus Andronicus is playing awesomely for an hour and a half!”

“How is that even possible?” you might ask. “The Monitor is only an hour long.” In a surprising display of outside-the-box thinking, Titus Andronicus didn’t just play straight through their concept album. And they didn’t have to. If you’ve heard the album then you know that it’s a little more complicated than the “about the civil war” tagline everyone’s been assigning to it, meaning that we won’t have to worry about The Monitor becoming a Broadway musical, the fact that The Monitor isn’t set in the Civil War period and doesn’t feature a direct narrative account of any battles, not even of the USS Monitor duking it out with the CSS Virginia, allows Titus Andronicus to choose songs that complement their newest endeavor in the live setting. Those spoken introductions disappear and we get to hear songs from all the way back on their first EP.

Stickles referred to one such oldie as “a song devoid of context,” but I would disagree. We knew those songs weren’t new, but each song added to the set was linked somehow to a division within or a struggle between forces equally matched as those two warships. At the end of the day, Titus Andronicus are successful live for the same reason they are successful on wax: They understand that a concept is just a place from which to start and they refuse to let it determine where they’ll go.

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