Titus Andronicus

"A More Perfect Union"

by Brian Howard

The Monitor, the sophomore album from Glen Rock, N.J.'s Titus Andronicus (playing The Barbary April 15), is the early favorite for most frantically intense of the decade, and Dirty Jerz and the Civil War are its muses. The seven-minutes-plus opening track kicks off with that Lincoln quote about living forever or dying by suicide, takes the piss on Springsteen's "Born to Run," riffs on Billy Bragg's "New England," exhorts us to "rally around the flag" to guitars as bagpipes, and closes with a quote from William Lloyd Garrison. In other words, "A More Perfect Union," a song which fancies New Jersey as the setting for its own little civil war, sets the bar impossibly high, and yet it's a bar the band hurdles repeatedly and defiantly over the course of 60 anthem-packed minutes on what very well could be the indie rock album of the year.