Taking place over five sold out nights last July at their adopted home in New York DIY Space / venue / sweat box Shea Stadium, Titus Andronicus’ S+@dium Rock live album is a rough and ragged take on some of the stand out tracks from their mammoth 29-song, 93 minute, five act rock opera album from last year, The Most Lamentable Tragedy.
It’s a penchant of Titus Andronicus’ leader Patrick Stickles to tread between a big concept, like The Most Lamentable Tragedy, but to never let Titus become too grandiose. They’ve always been true to their roots as a bar band, despite their records having perfectly sheened production.
This influence of bands like The Replacements comes to life on S+@dium Rock, as the songs are upped in tempo, with standout single from The Most Lamentable Tragedy, ‘Dimed Out‘ becoming nearly incomprehensible.
The songs have the feel of being recorded in a small, raucous bar environment, and a track that benefits from this is the jaunty, piano-led ‘I Lost My Mind‘ which sounds like a barroom sing-a-long, though does devolve again into sounding exhausted, which does give a sense of the atmosphere in the room, but doesn’t necessarily come across well on a live album.
There is one new track on this live recording which was left off of The Most Lamentable Tragedy ‘69 Stones‘, which sounds like it was made in Big Pink as an off-cut from Bob Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes.
Tracks like ‘Fatal Flaw‘ sound like they are to come apart at any moment with their pacing and freneticism, but it’s tracks like ‘Stable Boy’ that maybe suffer from the stripped back attitude to the songs and lack of instrumentation not allowing them to sound as big as perhaps they need to.
S+@dium Rock allows Titus Andronicus to live out one of the many characters they have as a band – of the raucous touring rock band who sound sloppy one night and amazing the next rolling into your town in a van; which of course, they are. Also though, conversely at the same time, they’re the most experimental, and in a musical sense boundary pushing punk rock band on the planet.
