Live Review: Titus Andronicus at Mississippi Studios, 10/2

Or: How I learned to stop hating and love Titus Andronicus.

By Chris Stamm

There are some exceptional songs in the Titus Andronicus catalog, but the band's ragged swagger always struck me as corny and overbearing, like an advertisement for the passion and grit of a better band. I finally found that band on Oct. 2. It is called Titus Andronicus.

The New Jersey sextet's maximalist tendencies can be bullying in recorded form, but what I'd previously perceived as an eagerness to impress revealed itself at Mississippi Studios to be a need to connect by any means necessary. And yes, it was sometimes silly. There's an undeniable whiff of vintage Meat Loaf (or, worse, curdled Green Day) when Titus Andronicus indulges in rock opera grandiosity, and stuff like the Springsteen nod ("tramps like us, baby we were born to die") in "A More Perfect Union" will probably always just make me crave a date with the real Boss. It works, though.

More than works: It fucking stuns. If I could isolate and describe the way frontman Patrick Stickles' presence transforms such mannered lifts into ecstatic truth, I would use my newfound knowledge of ineffable magnetism to make myself famous, but I cannot quite figure out how Stickles wrestles such startling glory out of familiar gestures. Like a snake gliding past your feet on a paved hiking trail, Stickles' strange animal energy turns passive pleasure into a fight-or-flight buzz. He knows this. And he has a preacher's ability to absorb the charge and send it back out as a convincing entreaty: feel this, feel me, commune, be alive. It is presence that begs us to be present, and it is a special and beautiful thing.

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