Patrick Stickles was onstage, every fiber of his being soaked through with sweat, wearing nothing but black underpants, while his band played “Freebird.” To the uninitiated, the premise would be absurd: a punk band wrapping up a five-night residency at the (now-dearly-departed) Brooklyn DIY institution Shea Stadium with a slew of classic rock covers. To anyone familiar with Titus Andronicus, there was no better culmination. Shea was a tiny room hidden on a dark industrial street in the no man’s land between Williamsburg and Bushwick, and the residency had been a feverish, oppressively hot week leading up to Patrick Stickles’ 30th birthday, the day Titus Andronicus released their fourth album, The Most Lamentable Tragedy. He turns 40 today, and the album turns 10.
I made it to two of those Shea shows, including the birthday blowout (which, incidentally, Titus have commemorated today with a live album called The Worst Of My Birthdays). Across that week, the band showcased a bunch of vital, instant-Titus-classic new material alongside old favorites and deep cuts and a dizzying array of covers even by their standards. One night, “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” and “Gimme Shelter” sat next to each other. For the finale, the band basically played half a set of their material, then invited Craig Finn onstage to sing Billy Joel, “Stuck Between Stations,” and the Replacements. Ted Leo did “Dancing In The Dark.” Even through the haze of 10 years and that night’s humidity, I remember it as one of the best nights I ever had. It was a freewheeling, excessive party befitting the album it celebrated.
To the uninitiated, the premise of The Most Lamentable Tragedy would, too, be absurd. Even for diehards it was a lot to wrap one’s head around. Stickles had returned with a 93-minute rock opera about manic depression, divided into multiple acts across 29 tracks. It had room for a bunch of furious rockers, naturally, but also covers of the Pogues and Daniel Johnston, multiple interstitial tracks of total silence, a hymn, and a rendition of “Auld Lang Syne.” It was a wildly ambitious, unruly album — over-the-top by design. But this was the band that had blown up with an album that used an extended Civil War metaphor for the battles we wage internally and against our (sometimes imagined) enemies with no victory in sight. Few guitar bands of Titus’ generation were doing anything near this. They had punk ethics but sought to operate on a scale much more rooted in the classic rock tradition.
Though it’s somewhat difficult to imagine given the underground journeyman character Titus Andronicus has long since settled into, they were once a buzz band. After online hype swirled around The Airing Of Grievances and The Monitor, Local Business was perceived as a downturn, having received a more muted response from fans and critics alike. Though that album remains unfairly sidelined in Titus’ story, the stage had been set for a comeback. All of this was clearly on Stickles’ mind at the time; he freely admitted he’d been in a brutal depression during the making of Local Business and was “devastated” the album didn’t take off like its predecessor.
By its release, Stickles had already been discussing the rock opera for years. In a late 2013 Stereogum interview, a post-mortem on Local Business quickly turned to Stickles excitedly divulging his vision for what came next. The band had drummed up funds via their online store. Several of its key tracks were road-tested. Forever aware of and trying to steer Titus’ narrative, Stickles conceived the rock opera as a return-to-form. Rankled by the long shadow already cast by The Monitor’s legacy, he sought to outdo himself, to deliver another sprawling epic that fans would embrace as fervently.
On The Most Lamentable Tragedy, Stickles once more created a customary Titus narrator, a thinly veiled stand-in for himself. Here, our narrator wrestles with manic and depressive episodes while undergoing various revelations and travails. Early on, he meets a doppelgänger of himself, who leads him into embracing the chaos. Love, drug abuse, and suicidal ideation eventually follow. In a 2022 Rolling Stone interview, Stickles asserted that all Titus albums essentially have the same “punchline,” refined with a new perspective of getting a bit older and a bit better along the way. After traveling through existential hell, the rock opera’s protagonist arrives at a weary resolution that, ultimately, it’s worth it to keep going.
Though that might suggest a weathered wisdom, The Most Lamentable Tragedy gets there by wielding fire. Stickles wasn’t messing around with this one, nor with reigniting people’s enthusiasm for Titus Andronicus. He had the goods here. It boasts two of the band’s inarguable all-timers in the anthemic swell of “Fired Up” and the scabrous roar of “Dimed Out.” Assisted by Owen Pallett’s string arrangements, each is a prime example of TMLT’s ability to wrangle the grandiosity of The Monitor into leaner, go-for-the-throat material. The album was littered with hits otherwise: the Stones swagger of both “Lonely Boy” and “Fatal Flaw,” Titus getting lighter on their feet with infectious tracks like “Mr. E. Mann” and “Come On, Siobhán,” visceral rippers like “I’m Going Insane” and “Into The Void.”
When Stickles let himself stretch out, it resulted in some of the album’s more underrated yet most enduring material: the foreboding, Irish-tinged “More Perfect Union”; the volcanic shape-shifter “(S)HE SAID / (S)HE SAID”; a rare moment of true beauty in the fifth iteration of “No Future,” a bare piano ballad. Detractors at the time of course poked fun at the sheer amount of a lot inherent to the album, but Stickles’ creative energy was off the charts here. When it came down to the songs, he was perhaps at the sharpest he’s ever been, rattling off one indelible riff or melody after another all while corralling every facet of Titus’ musical identity to that point. Though you couldn’t really force a reprise of the intense moment-in-time attachment fans had with The Monitor, Stickles mainly succeeded in his aims. Once preambles about its intimidating density passed, the rock opera was greeted rapturously. A comeback secured, another classic in the catalogue.
In some fashion, Titus albums are always reactive, sometimes driven by Stickles’ career machinations and sometimes by mental health swings. Following the scope of The Monitor would’ve been a fool’s errand, and it made sense Local Business went tighter and slicker. But in response to some factions of the audience rejecting that, The Most Lamentable Tragedy opened it all the way up again while going rawer, more ragged. Accordingly, the tank had been emptied and Stickles once more went smaller afterwards, with the mellow A Productive Cough in 2018 and its no-nonsense rock companion An Obelisk in 2019. After those, too, received a more mixed reaction, he swung for the fences on 2022’s The Will To Live, which once more grappled with the big questions while chasing a platonic ideal of “Ultimate Rock.” As Titus Andronicus, somehow, barrels towards their 20th anniversary, it’s clear Stickles’ best work arrives when he goes big, even if you can’t expect each album to scale that mountain. Though The Most Lamentable Tragedy couldn’t exactly replicate the ascendant buzz that once surrounded Titus Andronicus, it lives on as probably the only Titus album that could reasonably tussle with The Monitor as Stickles’ masterpiece.
In more cantankerous, contrarian years, Stickles often appeared to take some pleasure in confounding: challenging fans in order to weed out the truly devout, zigging around critical expectations, thwarting conventional industry wisdom. When TMLT was coming out, he had begun suggesting maybe Titus was running its course and this would be the conclusion. It had everything built in for that — littered with lore relating back to other albums, closing with a song made on the same tape recorder used for The Airing Of Grievances. Pseudo-self-titled, it brought it all back home. Of course, there have been three more Titus albums since. But it was the end of something. As Stickles entered his thirties and eventually found some modicum of peace with his mental health, the timbre of Titus became more like a well-oiled machine built to last. The Most Lamentable Tragedy said goodbye to the band’s younger, wilder years when the wheels always seemed as if they could fly off.
In the year leading up to The Most Lamentable Tragedy, it was as if Titus Andronicus were a Brooklyn house band. This is, at least, the way my memory feels, even if I can find little evidence online to support my recollection that I was seeing them every couple of weeks at random small venues. I had recently moved back to New York; I was in my mid-twenties, finding my footing in Brooklyn. Leading up to those Shea Stadium shows, I’d see them every chance I got and had already grown to love the rock opera songs in a way not dissimilar to how The Monitor had once been a salve through countless bus rides criss-crossing the northeast during listless college years. It didn’t matter if you had your own direct experience with the specific mental health struggles depicted therein. The Most Lamentable Tragedy was personal but also universal, picking up the thread from the most poignant and potent veins of Stickles’ writing.
Just as The Monitor had once meant everything to us for its coming-of-age ennui, The Most Lamentable Tragedy captured the messiness of becoming an adult and sifting through the baggage that made you who you are. At 30, Stickles had a slightly different take than he did at 25, just as he eventually would in his late thirties for The Will To Live. The punchline might be reiterated a few times over, but here it had a kind of resolution for all that preceded it: You learn to live with all of this.
