![]() ![]() By the time they got to An Obelisk it seemed pretty evident that what they as a group had spent so much energy trying to conjure up on The Monitor, a will to live, had been supplanted by a seemingly autonomous drive to just exist, to keep churning out scattershot, unfocused releases with little of the rage and exuberance that they’d shown so brilliantly in their early career. ![]() That teeth-clenched, sloppy vitality in the face of a life that has very little chance of meaning anything resonated deeply with my 20 year old self and told me, before I ever thought of turning to Camus or Kierkegaard, that even a life without purpose could be given meaning and even joy through sheer bloody-mindedness, and with the help of an anthemic chorus or two.Īnd then…well, what the hell happened? As though they’d spent every last ounce of creative energy they’d had on that one magnum opus, Titus Andronicus subsequently churned out mediocrity after mediocrity, with ever-diminishing returns for the time invested in listening. So, when that titanic, 14 minute struggle against despair that is The Battle of Hampton Roads first hit me, it hit like a freight train and while to credit it with keeping me alive would be more than a bit much, it was one of the medications in my arsenal that I found myself turning to most often. It was at one of the lowest points in my life that I discovered The Monitor my father had very recently passed, my new career had totally failed to live up to what I’d been promised, and I found myself living alone in a totally new city hundreds of miles from my still-grieving family and my friends. Truth be told, I’d kind of forgotten about Titus Andronicus, a band whose heyday ran parallel to a period in my life when their scrappy existentialist outlook was, at times, my main motivation to keep getting up in the morning. Review Summary: The will to live can be an awful curse/ on an earth that's just a lot of dirt/ whenever it is that you're getting hurt/ that's just the will to live doin' its work ![]()
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