The Airing Of Grievances

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.

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.

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.

These are songs to learn and sing as loudly, messily and drunkenly as possible.

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.

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.

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.

Angst has a new champion.

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.

Each play of Grievances is like that triumphant, sweaty bar show, right there in your room.

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.

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.

It 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]

The 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]

Feuled 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]

Muddy production means the literate lyrics often get drowned out by the surrounding racket, but otherwise this is a raw treat. [Mar 2009, p.105]