Philosophical punks

Titus Andronicus air their ‘Grievances’

With their debut album, “The Airing of Grievances,” New Jersey’s Titus Andronicus couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate title.

The songs are glorious exorcisms of pent-up frustrations that range from the social to the societal to the psychological. Guitars jangle and they blaze, and an occasional cheap-sounding keyboard will float above the spastic backbeat. And at the front of this mess, and sometimes fighting hard to claw its way out of it, is the melodic shout of Patrick Stickles, whose vocals recall old yellers like the Pogues and the Replacements, and whose songwriting sense converges somewhere between two very different hometown heroes, Springsteen and the Misfits. 

But back to the “Grievances,” towards the front of the album, Stickles is yelling about how after you’re born “You’ll spend the rest of your life trying too hard to forget that you met the world naked and screaming and that’s how you’ll leave it,” in the song “My Time Outside the Womb.”
He says of the song that “we spend so much time running away from things and burying things where we hope they’ll never be found. We’re all kind of living a comfortable lie of our own creation to varying degrees.”

Lest you think Stickles is being a crybaby about the human predicament, it should also be noted that there is a certain celebration in the catharsis of “Airing.”

“It’s kind of like a cleansing process, in a way,” he says. “It’s kind of like what Nietzsche and Sartre and Camus were all talking about. I take it that you have to reject everything to believe in anything. … That can be a really upsetting thing to think about but through the pain of moving through that can come the joy of hopefully getting closer to your authentic self once you’ve wiped off whatever indoctrinations you can.”

Punk rock philosophy? Well, yeah. Would you expect anything less from a band that takes their name from a Shakespearean tragedy? Their debut is littered with literary and philosophical references.

“I like to think that we’re really just singing about the history of ideas and trying to insert ourselves into a greater continuum of thinkers throughout history,” says Stickles, “not in any kind of ‘here’s the new f—ing smart dude’ kind of thing, just like any point that you could think to make in a punk rock song has already been made ages ago … and there’s plenty of works of philosophy that have already explored the same themes that punk does.”

But a Titus Andronicus show is anything but a lecture. Stickles, with his huge beard, bumbles around and guzzles beer and could almost be mistaken for a homeless person were he not surrendering himself entirely to the songs, jumping up and down and generally airing all those grievances. So now that they have aired them, will it be harder to sing about what bothers them as they reach new successes?

“They’ll never all be out there,” assures Stickles, with a laugh. “I hope, but I doubt there will ever be a shortage of good complaining points.”

Titus Andronicus
with SoSo Glos and Yoni Gordon and the Goods
Thursday, Sept. 3, 8 p.m.
Harpers Ferry
158 Brighton Ave., Allston
MBTA: Green B Line to Harvard Street
$10, 18+, 617-254-9743
www.harpersferryboston.com

Titus Andronicus
with SoSo Glos
Tuesday, Oct. 13
Barbary
951 Frankford Ave., Philadelphia
$10-$12, 215-634-7400
www.myspace.com/thenewbarbary

Titus Andronicus
with SoSo Glos
Thursday, Oct. 15, 8 p.m.
The Knitting Factory
361 Metropolitan Ave., Brooklyn
$12, 347-529-6696
www.ticketfly.com