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Jul 27, 2015TMLT feels like the Titus Andronicus record par excellence, it pushes and shoves at the boundaries of what such a record could or should conceivably sound like.
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Jul 23, 2015This is music that wants to be read as a text, and deserves to be. The fact that it comes to us in an era of smartphones and shortening attention spans only serves to underscore its audacity.
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Jul 28, 2015No, TMLT is not as precise as The Monitor, nor as pleasurable. It does, however, surpass it in imagination and aim. This alone cements The Most Lamentable Tragedy as one of this year’s greatest rock records.
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Jul 23, 2015Best of all, it’s very self-aware. Stickles puts it all on the table, ready to blame, excuse, forgive and destroy himself perhaps as an example for us when we’re trying to decide how to deal with our own imperfections.
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Aug 7, 2015Of course The Most Lamentable Tragedy is ridiculous. It's also dumb, intelligent, heartbreaking and life-affirming.
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Aug 3, 2015While Matt Bellamy drowned in pretension and tone-deaf bombast, Stickles astutely embraces the grandiose, distilling his troubles into some of the sharpest songwriting of his career and a spectacular display of ownership.
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Jul 30, 2015If you can convince yourself of TMLT being a novel, a musical, or five EPs crammed into one record, the experience becomes more immersive and rich.
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Jul 30, 2015The Most Lamentable Tragedy is the product of one of the best punk bands of our time making music in their prime, and when you factor in the level of ambition present, you’re left with a rock opera for the ages.
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Jul 29, 2015The high, both in the story line and in the course of the album, is temporary. But it’s one of several vertiginous peaks on a pretty vertiginous record.
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UncutJul 28, 2015The Most Lamentable Tragedy feels like a quintessentially modern album, a scintillating examination of mania and neurosis that uses the history of rock'n'roll as mere stage dressing for its bravura performance. [Sep 2015, p.65]
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Jul 23, 2015Great art isn't great art because it's easy, and this 90-plus-minute, five-act rock opera inspired by Stickles' experience with manic depression is absolutely worth spending the time with.
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Jul 31, 2015You can hear, see, feel Titus Andronicus trying their damnedest, and when the band’s talented musicians aren’t interrupted for the sake of concept, that enthusiasm and the resulting excellent songs pass infectiously to the listener.
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Jul 27, 2015A 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that immediately restored their claims to outsized ambition, as only a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera might.
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Aug 3, 2015The album demands a lot from our short-attention-span culture, but it's not time you'll feel like you've wasted. [Sep 2015, p.98]
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Aug 3, 2015The Monitor makes the listener feel unified with the band in their alienation. The Most Lamentable Tragedy presents an abstracted story as its emotional core, and it’s significantly harder to respond to that more distant lyrical perspective.
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Aug 3, 2015Sad, contemplative and euphoric in equal measure, The Most Lamentable Tragedy is a true triumph.
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Jul 30, 2015Sometimes suggesting a cross between Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade and Bruce Springsteen's The River, The Most Lamentable Tragedy is as big, smart, and heartfelt as either of those albums, and a striking example of what Titus Andronicus can achieve.
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Jul 30, 2015There's not much that's accessible about The Most Lamentable Tragedy, but that's a good thing.
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Jul 30, 2015The Most Lamentable Tragedy can be a harrowing listen, but it’s also laced with jokes and music that’s fun and invigorating.
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Jul 28, 2015There are a few weak spots (Stickles' voice is much less suited for the closing ballads than the freight-train punk tracks, though the ballads better suit the surprisingly hopeful lyrics), but The Most Lamentable Tragedy is never less than interesting and rarely less than thrilling.
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Jul 30, 2015A few indulgences like an ‘Auld Lang Syne’ singalong are the main gripes to dampen an otherwise monumental presence.
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Jul 30, 2015Tragedy reflects the wild mood swings associated with those suffering from bipolar disorder; raging one moment, euphoric the next before settling into a seemingly bottomless depression. And like those suffering, it’s not always a pleasant listening experience, but when it’s on, it’s some of their best and most musically mature work yet.
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Jul 29, 2015A shaggy chorale, a piano ballad, organ drones and Celtic touches--including a hurtling cover of the Pogues' "A Pair of Brown Eyes"--provide variety. But the center remains frontman Patrick Stickles' desperate howl.
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Aug 3, 2015Where TMLT fails, it’s because of Stickles’ long-windedness and the self-obsession at the heart of this work; almost certainly a by-product of his diagnosis. Mostly, though, this lament is no tragedy, but a spirited two-fingers; a celebration of the artistic payload of atypical brain chemistry.
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Jul 29, 2015The problem is that if it’s not very compelling as theatre, the theatrical parts get in the way of enjoying the songs, which are pretty good in a brash, bull-headed, punk-belligerent kind of way.
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Jul 23, 2015The problems come when the band try to stretch themselves. The synth interludes and faux-hymns are one thing, but the two lengthy songs at the album’s centre are something else entirely: the former are over and done with quickly, the latter are interminable.
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Aug 7, 2015Where things ought to be reduced and given more purpose, they instead stampede into goodness-knows-where. Ambition doesn’t always equal perfection. Rock operas have their place, but this isn’t the pick of the bunch.
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Jul 31, 2015The problem with albums about depression is that they are the most literal exposition of the principle that an artist has suffered for their work, and now it’s our turn--and doubly so when it’s a 90-minute punk-opera wrenched screaming from their very soul, as here.
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Q MagazineJul 30, 2015While there's throat-shredding fervour, it becomes a crazily overextended blur of goofy anthemics. [Sep 2015, p.117]
User score distribution:
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Positive: 42 out of 51
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Mixed: 1 out of 51
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Negative: 8 out of 51
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Aug 19, 2015
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Aug 5, 2015
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Aug 3, 2015