The Monitor vs. The Virginia (Guest Post)

Owen Chambers (a.k.a. Tremolo Ghosts) on Titus Andronicus, their masterpiece of a second album, and why he wrote a song about it for Songs About Albums: Volume 2.

The Monitor by New Jersey punk band Titus Andronicus is an album about civil war. Not, strictly speaking, the Civil War fought between the Union and the Confederacy in North America from 1861 to 1865, although the band do utilise historical events and speeches from that period to enrich their sprawling punk masterpiece.

Most Read of 2015

Happy New Year everyone! On Monday, I'll be looking ahead to some of the releases I'm excited to hear in 2016; for now, let's take a moment to look back on the year we've just left behind. Here's a quick countdown of The Album Wall's Most-Read Blog Posts of 2015...

10) 10 Questions for ESKA
A brief Q&A with Mercury-nominated musician Eska Mtungwazi.

9) Dimed Out
A preview of The Most Lamentable Tragedy by Titus Andronicus, written a couple of months before its release (spoiler: the album is every bit as excellent as I hoped it would be).

8) Review: Wasting Away and Wondering
Thoughts on the fab third album from Cardiff pop troupe The School.

7) Day-Glo Dreams & The Art of Depressing Me
What makes a truly depressing album? In this blog, I suggest that Helen Love may well have a better idea than the moody likes of Thom Yorke et al.

6) Abstract Heart
My review of Zervas & Pepper's latest LP.

5) Revisiting Little Kix
Is Mansun's much-maligned third album really as bad as some fans would have you believe?

4) 10 Questions for Trembling Bells
The genre-juggling folk-rockers offer up some insight on their latest album, The Sovereign Self.

3) Under the Western Freeway
My first blog post of 2015 revisited Grandaddy's full-length debut and found it to be, well, something of a downer. Who would have thought?!

2) Mogwai Albums from Worst to Best
Mogwai celebrated their 20th anniversary this month - here's your ultimate guide to their 8 studio albums.

1) Björk Battles the Leakers
In my most-read post of 2015, I examined the fallout that ensued when Vulnicura, the new Björk album, was leaked online months in advance of its scheduled release date.

Hope you've all enjoyed reading The Album Wall over the past 12 months - I can't wait to hear what sort of sounds 2016 will serve up!

Top 10 Albums of 2015

2015 has been an excellent year for new music, and selecting just 10 outstanding albums from the riches lately lavished upon my ears was no easy task. Several deserving LPs have cruelly been excluded here, but rules is rules (even if I made them up) and only 10 records can make the final cut.

So here they are: The Album Wall's Top 10 Albums of 2015. How many have you heard?

10) The Sovereign Self by Trembling Bells

This is a glorious folk-proggy mess of an album. The Sovereign Self finds Trembling Bells straddling the river of history, dipping a big net in the water, and throwing everything they catch into the pot. Straightahead krautrock, medieval ballads, psychedelic hard rock...it's all here, bubbling noisily away, and the resulting stew is quite remarkable indeed.

Best Tracks: I is Someone Else // Killing Time in London Fields // Sweet Death Polka

Top 20 Songs of 2015 (Part 2)

Here we go, then - the cream of the cream of the crop. Here are my Top 10 Songs of 2015 (if you missed the first half of this list, click here to read it before continuing):

10) Eugene & Maurice by Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom

(from Don't Believe the Hyperreal)

Eugene & Maurice is a bit of an oddity on Don't Believe the Hyperreal, which is - for the most part - an album of duets. However, this song (the album's closer) is sung by Ariel and Ariel alone, lending a sad, lonely feeling to a song that frankly would have been heartbreaking enough anyway. Eugene & Maurice tells the true story of author Maurice Sendak and his partner Dr Eugene Glynn; since both men are now (spoiler alert!) deceased, I suppose this biography was never going to have a happy ending, but Sharratt's splendidly sad and decidely Anway-esque delivery somehow makes the whole thing even more devastating.

November Playlist: Hang Like a Star

Eek - it's almost December! Before I give my ears entirely over to Christmas music, here are 10 of the tracks they've enjoyed this month...

1. Eugene - Sufjan Stevens

(from Carrie & Lowell)

Carrie & Lowell may not be as emotive as I'd hoped, but its constituent tracks - including this pretty ode to holidays in Oregon - are never less than lovely.

On All-Inclusive Setlists

As you may or may not have noticed, I didn't post a new blog last Friday. This was because I was in Bristol for a Titus Andronicus gig at Thekla, and it's difficult to concentrate on blogging when your legs still ache from being jackknifed into a Megabus seat.

Also, I'd left my laptop at home.

Anyway, Titus Andronicus were excellent, exuding a remarkable energy and giving me plenty of opportunities to shout my favourite lines at the top of my voice ("You will always be a loser", indeed.)

Perhaps the best thing about the show, however, was the setlist, which ran roughly as follows:

Upon Viewing Bruegel's 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'

Still Life with Hot Deuce and Silver Platter

Stranded (On My Own)

In a Big City

Fatal Flaw

Come On, Siobhan

Joset of Nazareth's Blues

Tried to Quit Smoking

Dimed Out

A More Perfect Union

Titus Andronicus Forever

A Pot in Which to Piss

No Future Part V: In Endless Dreaming

No Future Part Three: Escape From No Future

Titus Andronicus

----------------------

Brown Sugar (The Rolling Stones cover)

August Playlist: Roll with the Changes

August - and, by extension, summer - is just about over, but before we dive head-first into autumn (my favourite time of year, brimming with colour and crispness and dancing celebrities), let's look back at the last thirty days and take stock of what I was listening to this month...

1. Dimed Out - Titus Andronicus
(from The Most Lamentable Tragedy)
August was the month I finally sank my teeth into Titus Andronicus's two-disc rock opera, The Most Lamentable Tragedy. The album's rollicking lead single is still a highlight, but there's plenty more where this came from - read my thoughts on TMLT here.

Thoughts on The Most Lamentable Tragedy

As of last month, everyone inhabits a slightly more perfect universe in which Titus Andronicus have recorded a feature-length rock opera and we can all listen to it. I've listened to The Most Lamentable Tragedy many times over the last week or so - below are some of the thoughts I've had whilst doing so.

• It's great to see The Most Lamentable Tragedy continuting Titus Andronicus's long-running 'No Future' saga, and No Future Part IV: No Future Triumphant may be the best instalment yet. I love how the repeated line "I hate to be awake" can easily be misheard as "I ache to be awake", expressing both that the protagonist is only happy when he's asleep and that he never really feels like he's truly awake.
  
  

Looking Forward to the Rest of 2015

This whole week has been dedicated to The Album Wall's 2015 Halftime Report. I've already shared my favourite songs and albums of the year so far; now it's time to look to the future.

Here are five albums (not including the Iron Maiden album and the potential Tindersticks album that I discussed last week) that I'm looking forward to hearing in the latter months of 2015:

The Most Lamentable Tragedy by Titus Andronicus

Out July 28

If there's one band I from whom I really, really want to hear a five-act, multi-disc rock opera, it's Titus Andronicus. They already proved their ability to make untedious long albums with The Monitor, and early signs suggest that they'll be able to do the pretentious concept album thing (lot's of fun) without actually making over-pretentious music (less fun). Case in point: lead single Dimed Out, a body-blow of a punk rock song that's probably more enjoyable than anything that's ever been tagged 'rock opera' in the past.

The Long Farewell

Has this ever happened to you?

You buy the latest CD from one of your favourite bands. You take it home, peel off the cellophane, and pop it into your computer to rip this new acquisition to iTunes/Windows Media Player/whatever.

After a moment, your PC recognises the fact that you've given it an album to chew on, and up pops the 'Rip CD' screen, which looks something like this:

And that's when you spot something unusual in the 'Time' column. Most of the songs on this album are between two and five minutes long - pretty standard stuff - but the last song clocks in at just under a quarter of an hour.

Election Special (or, The Enemy is Still Everywhere)

So the third and final Glastonbury headliner has been revealed, and it's...*yawn*...The Who. At least the brie-eating dinosaurs who whinged about Kanye West getting his black all over the line-up might stop complaining now; I bet those guys can imagine no better weekend than one that culminates in hearing the two members of The Who who haven't died yet play an extended version of Won't Get Fooled Again.

That was *going* to be the first paragraph of today's blog post. I was *going* to write a slightly angry but ultimately inconsequential little rant about Glastonbury, and then maybe list some bands who I personally think would make good headliners for next time.

Sadly, though, there's another - much bigger - bit of news that I'd like to address today. You see, The Who's Pyramid Stage headline slot isn't the only reason why this has been a good week for old, conservative white men.

That, friends, is what a Conservative majority looks like. In case you've been living under a rock (or, y'know, in a different country), the United Kingdom had a general election yesterday, and it's now been confirmed that David Cameron will be our Prime Minister for another five years.

Dimed Out

There was exciting news from the Titus Andronicus camp last week. The band's fourth album, The Most Lamentable Tragedy, will be coming out on the 28th of July, and it gives me great joy to report that it will be a 29-track, 93-minute, double-disc (triple if you buy the vinyl version) concept album.

Here's the skinny:

The central narrative of TMLT (“a work of fiction,” claims singer/songwriter Patrick Stickles) concerns an unnamed protagonist whom we meet in deep despair. Following an encounter with his own doppelgänger (an enigmatic stranger, identical in appearance though opposite in disposition), long held secrets are revealed, sending our protagonist on a transformative odyssey, through past lives and new loves, to the shocking revelation that the very thing that sustains him may be the thing to destroy him.

This announcement was accompanied by the release of Dimed Out, one of those twenty-nine new recordings:

It fucking slays.

The Long Song (Guest Post)

In today's blog, Paul Jennings scours his library for >8 minute odysseys that he actually likes...

Meat Loaf. It's always Meat Loaf. Usually Bat Out Of Hell. All 9 minutes 53 seconds of it.

You know the guy. He's the one nursing his quid, analysing the pub jukebox, trying to find the long songs. It's quantity over quality. He demands his VFM. He wants his Meat Loaf. If you're very unlucky he'll double up with a portion of American Pie, weighing in at a calorific 8 minutes 33 seconds. I feel sick and fetch my coat.

The beauty of the 3 minute pop song is that if you don't like it, there'll be another one along shortly. Hard to do when ruffle-cuffed theatre boy insists on dragging his songs out to a fortnight.

The long song is wide open for self-indulgence. The six minute solo for the bassist who feels undervalued by the band or the drummer still irked that he didn't get a co-writer credit on the last album.

So, I set myself a challenge. Five songs of eight minutes or over that won't make you hit the skip track button.

1. Johnny Was - Stiff Little Fingers

from Inflammable Material, 1979

“Woman hold her head and cry,

'Cause her son has been shot down in the street and died,

Just because of the system”

Encore favourite from 1979 classic Inflammable Material. SLF have made this Bob Marley cover so firmly their own it's hard to believe it wasn't written in and about their native Belfast.

ROPSWEDs

I love it when bands include references to their old songs within the lyrics of their new songs. Those little nods to previous work help to tie discographies together, making everything seem like one body of work rather than a series of similar-sounding but ultimately unrelated CDs.

The literature word for this is intertextuality, but that's a clunky word that makes you sound like a dork, so I've decided to give those little callbacks a new name: ROPSWEDs. It stands for:

Remember Our Previous Stuff? We Evidently Do!

So yeah, here are some of my favourite ROPSWEDs:

Sing for the Submarine by R.E.M. (from Accelerate)
Released in the spring of 2008, Accelerate was one big olive branch to R.E.M. fans after the disappointingly bland Around the Sun. The band deliberately returned to a more invigorating, rocked-up sound on their 14th album, and they played a whole bunch of cool tracks from their early days on the subsequent Accelerate Tour (check out the Live at the Olympia album for a sample of that).

Sing for the Submarine remains my favourite track from Accelerate, and it includes yet another nod to their past in the form of this great little ROPSWED:

"So this is where I give in to the machine. Lift up your voice, feel gravity's pull."

The Enemy is Everywhere!

Some will tell you that The Monitor by Titus Andronicus is an album about the American Civil War. But those people are wrong (I think). While the spirit of the Civil War is certainly in there somewhere, the historical stuff is really just a framing device, rather than the record's central theme. Aside from the spoken word parts that pepper the album - quotes from Abraham Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison, and other movers and shakers of the era - direct references to the war are few and far between; instead, these songs tend to concentrate on far more modern matters.

My Top Ten

Since this is The Album Wall's 100th post (woo milestone!), I thought I'd give you all a treat and finally explain the reasoning behind my Top Ten list on the right-hand side of the blog. These are my ten favourite albums of all time - of all time! - and today, you're going to find out why.

Fables of the Reconstruction by R.E.M.

Why I Bought It: I was just starting to dig into R.E.M.'s rich discography. I'd already bought Out of Time; this was my next purchase, mainly because it was the cheapest one in HMV that day (£3!)

Why I Love It: Its sound is intriguing and mysterious when compared to other R.E.M. releases, and the loose running theme (a lot of tracks focus on unusual characters from the South) makes it a little more cohesive than its cousins. Oh, and it's the album that houses Life and How to Live It, which may possibly be my favourite song of all time.

3 for the Car: Driving Albums

I only recently passed my driving test, so when I was in sixth form and everyone was speeding about in their snazzy little cars that they knew how to operate, I was doomed - like Iggy Pop - to forever be the passenger. Okay, so it was nice to get so many lifts, but this arrangement afforded me a frustrating lack of control over the music we listened to. At best, the driver would throw on some Meat Loaf and everyone in the car would sing along to that; at worst, I'd get stuck listening to Lovin' You by Minnie Riperton.

But I've got my own pink license now, which means that I'm finally master of the car stereo! Here's a trio of albums that, in my limited experience, work well behind the wheel...

The Hold Steady - Almost Killed Me

Okay, so it starts a little too quietly, but if you can time it right, the effect is perfect. Use the first part of Positive Jam to reverse out of your drive or wiggle out of your parking space, and try to hit the road just as the drums kick in. After that, it's all triumphant, crunchy rock - it's hard to keep both hands on the wheel, such is the air-punching awesomeness of songs like The Swish and Knuckles, which you can hear in this video:

Titus Andronicus - Local Business

This album isn't even out in the UK yet, but one of my wonderful family members managed to sneak an import under the Christmas tree last year. And I'm glad they did it, because it meant that by the time I passed my test, I was familiar enough with this CD to shove it in the stereo and sing along to (most of) the words as I drove. Upon Viewing Oregon’s Landscape with the Flood of Detritus is about a road accident, which might not be ideal, but aside from that it's all gold. Take the snappily-named Still Life with Hot Deuce on Silver Platter, for example:

CAKE - Comfort Eagle

And just before I tattoo the words 'I LIKE BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND ANYTHING THAT SOUNDS LIKE HIM' across my forehead, here's something a little different. Comfort Eagle isn't quite as frantic as the other two albums, and the steady, almost hip-hopppy beats that underpin everything make for pretty good listening when you're driving around the city (although, again, there's a song about traffic trouble - Long Line of Cars might grate a little if you're stuck in a queue). Drumming along on the wheel is pretty much a dead cert. Here's my personal favourite, Pretty Pink Ribbon:

So there are three good driving albums that you can take for a spin this weekend. What do you tend to fill your car stereo with? Recommend me something in the comments!