- Record Label: Troubleman Unlimited
- Release Date: May 13, 2008
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
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On a lyric sheet, Titus Andronicus may appear to espouse the sort of wrist-cutting histrionics emo's typically lambasted for, but the magic lies in the band's oddly enthusiastic grass roots delivery.
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UncutThe Airing Of Grievances is one of the smartest, most joyous records in an age, channelling the spirit of other too-clever-by-half suburban punks from The Replacements to Nirvana and adding a dash of felllow New Jerseyite Bruce Springsteen's eye for detail. [MAr 2009, p.87]
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Each play of Grievances is like that triumphant, sweaty bar show, right there in your room.
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Q MagazineMuddy production means the literate lyrics often get drowned out by the surrounding racket, but otherwise this is a raw treat. [Mar 2009, p.105]
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There's emo in the tortured lyrics and E Street Band in the arrangements, both appropriate for a Jersey crew. And the sizzling, storage-locker production makes it all sound like a cage match.
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This sense of being aware of our own impending death leading to a heightened sense of life sums up perfectly The Airing of Grievances, an album that bemoans the past, shrugs it's shoulders and raises a glass to the future.
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These are songs to learn and sing as loudly, messily and drunkenly as possible.
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With its brash and boiling-over debut, Titus Andronicus has done its small part to draw indie-rock out of the genre's recent navel-obsessed slump.
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Patrick Stickles screams and moans amid the swirling, lo-fi racket, and although he sounds a helluva lot like Conor Oberst, this is no Bright Eyes knockoff. The Airing of Grievances is more inviting, fraternal, and widely referential.
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With thrash-and-burn riffs, shout-along rants, E Street Band-style blue-collar blues, and tin-can acoustics, these Jersey boys' debut album The Airing of Grievances burns all the way down from its big mouth to its black liver.
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Alternative PressIt might have sucked the first time you went through [the year between high school and college], but here, it couldn't sound better. [Mar 2009, p.113]
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The Airing Of Grievances is not about anything so much as it is for everything--the beauty of life, the tragedy of life wasted, the looming of death and the desire to go out having lived fully--no, it is not about those things at all, it is for those things, it is a collection of songs written as odes to the gritty and the beautiful and the mixing of the two: our world, our sick world.
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the majority of the album is exactly what indie rock has been lacking for over a decade, and this is too crucial a release to get caught up in nitpicking.
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Angst has a new champion.
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BlenderFeuled by a ninth-grader's nausea they refuse to grow out of, they take their skateboards and chase down the horizon. [Mar 2009, p.64]
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FilterIt remains instrumentally raucous, emotionally battered, and unaplogetically fun. [Winter 2009, p.100]
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In total--and there is absolutely no other way to absorb this album; if it lets up it will lose itself--the sentiment is hostile, championing a mismatched, bitchy pile of allusions to alienation, dissatisfaction, and indifference that begs for attention and respect but is too passive to amount to anything but a wan wash.
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This is the kind of record you'll spend days rocking out to. You'll get lost walking around listening to it (I know I did), think about quitting your job to relive the days when a record like this was all that was allowed to matter.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 19 out of 21
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Mixed: 0 out of 21
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Negative: 2 out of 21
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Aug 26, 2012
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Dec 20, 2021