It's late on a Thursday night in Brooklyn and a crowd of leather-jacketed young guys are packed into a sweaty basement bar. They're standing very still and looking towards the empty stage with quiet eagerness. Occasionally, one turns to my friend and me and asks us softly if, uh, we're going to, like, be OK? Their concern is soon explained. The band appears and its frontman leans into the mic to say: "So we're just gonna rock out a little." Then, in the instant that fingers hit strings and sticks touch drums, the stationary, solicitous bunch on the bar's floor snap into a limb-flailing blur of ecstatic thrashing. "Knocked sideways" takes on a literal meaning.
Titus Andronicus are a band who can do that to an audience, in both senses. The New Jersey five-piece can do literate and lyrically nimble screeds against boredom, hypocrisy and personal failure as well as they can do beer-spilling, singalong blasts about the joys of drunkenness. Songs such as A Pot in Which to Piss tumble into Pogues‑style reels, and almost everything they do revels in anthemic, Springsteen-like glory – but when they paraphrase the Boss on A More Perfect Union it's with the far more desperate roar of: "Baby we were born to die."
Their second album, The Monitor, is a concept album named after a US ironclad warship, launched in 1862, and it takes the American civil war as its central metaphor. That sounds somewhat grandiloquent, but for every sonorous excerpt of an Abraham Lincoln speech there's a "Fuck you!" to go with it. Appropriately, given their historical preoccupations, the band's frontman looks as though he's from another century, though he's just 25. Patrick Stickles, who writes all the songs, has a big slab of a beard and the sort of lowering eyebrows and wild stare you could imagine coming at you from a sepia photograph of an older, harder America.
We meet in Greenpoint in Brooklyn, where the album's eponymous ship was built. It's the day of the mid-term elections and Stickles describes the political situation in the band's home state: "The usual stuff. The usual fucking bullshit. It's sort of pointless because New Jersey has a very conservative governor now." Does he feel a bit hopeless, then? He may be capable of howling lyrics at a furious speed but when he speaks he seems to chew every thought he articulates. "Yyyeaaahhh … Suuure!" he says, before adding: "But who wouldn't be cheery? From such hopelessness, freedom is born."
That might sound like self-parody, but Stickles seems just as earnest as his music: neither The Monitor, released earlier this year, or 2008's The Airing of Grievances are afraid of savage emotional candour. He talks a lot about "internal validation", which sounds implausibly self-helpy for a band as scabrous as this. But for Stickles this means "understanding your values, deprogramming yourself in a lot of ways to, uh, sweep out some of the booby traps that have been put there by our evil overlords".
And who are they? "Who are they? They're all around us. The outside world, right? Y'know? There's no shortage of places that society would love to just plug us in like so many interchangeable parts – cogs in some great purposeful machine. But that sucks. Fuck that." With a sigh, Stickles lists his interests as "Conflict. General ennui. The failure of the outside world to validate me and subsequent anger about that." According to the fists-in-the-air chorus of Titus Andronicus Forever: "The enemy is everywhere."
But it would be unfair to assume adolescent paranoia is the only thing riling this band. Nietzsche keeps popping up in conversation, and Stickles explains the civil war theme thus: "We define ourselves so often in opposition to the other, rather than trying to define ourselves positively. Maybe this results in a moral deficit. Even though like here in America we're supposed to all be a team, we're really not. We're really at each other's throats. And so if we won't even talk about that, then I figure talking about this particular military conflict, which is quite legendary over here, and carries a lot of weight – that could be a metaphor that could stand over 65 minutes. I feel very lucky that I have the forum to scream my face off for 65 minutes at a time. Without that, who knows what I might do."
With that he fixes me with a mad stare, which he holds for several seconds. "Nah!" he says finally. "I'm just kiddin', I'm not going to do anything bad." And then frowns: "But it is true, it's good to have an outlet."
It's rare to find a band endeavouring to be both morally and intellectually instructive, who've also earned a near-mythological status as a live act. "Well we do try to get the kids excited," Stickles says laconically. "Most people wouldn't think those things go together but that's just symptomatic of us humans' reductive tendencies, right? Cause we contain multitudes, like Walt Whitman said. Urges visceral and cerebral alike."
And the tension between those two urges is there in the band's name. As Stickles puts it: "Shakespeare lives at the top of the canon, so he's the most fanciest, sophisticated thing ever." But the play they're named after "is more like just gory slasher-type stuff. So that represented a certain dichotomy." It also has a suitably monumental ring to it: "I'd hear teachers say it and I'd be like, 'Oh, isn't that an appealing collection of phonemes?'"
During their rattling set in the Brooklyn bar, there was no let up in the euphoric flailing at their feet – except for one moment when an altercation down the front caused things to clatter to a ramshackle halt. Stickles, whooped on by a righteous crowd, berated the offender like a right-on teacher: "You making a scene? You should go to the bathroom, pal. What did we just say about personal responsibility? Go get yourself washed up and think about what it takes to be responsible. Now let's get this shit back on track."
"I guess in a situation like that," he says later, frowning into his coffee, "you have the option of pretending that you're just a cold, emotionless entertainer in the machine. But," he sighs, "probably better to continue to be a person." By which he means, hold on to your morals. Stickles has a tattoo of the logo of Crass, the politically uncompromising punk group who lived in a commune in Essex. Struggling to put his admiration into words, he manages: "Their morals were just so upstanding."
Rather than stay in hotels, the band stay on fans' floors when they tour. They are, Stickles assures, very well-behaved house guests. "We'll pick up after ourselves if we've made any kind of mess," he says. "We try to be polite." This accommodation solution seems in keeping with a wish to remain human.
"Breaking the fourth wall, right?" he says. Not that they're adverse to TV's fourth wall: last summer they performed on comedian Jimmy Fallon's talkshow – hardly the bastion of indie credibility. "That was a fun thing," says Stickles. "The mainstream media is very good for pleasing our parents." And, as these sorts of appearances become more frequent, that underdog spirit might start to look a little unfounded.
His growing success has even rendered Stickles's feelings towards Springsteen, a fellow Jerseyite, amusingly ambivalent: "Being told a thousand times that we have something to do with Bruce Springsteen has kind of put me off listening to his music. Which is too bad," he says. "For better or worse, when I listen to it I feel kind of like a cartoon caricature of myself. Which I guess is one of the side effects of living in this crazy postmodern world. Sometimes nowadays you don't know whether you're yourself, or your Facebook profile, or your Twitter feed, or the person who's going to appear in your article."
And with that, the person in this article has to be off. He's heading back to New Jersey in the band's van to move a mattress, duly admire his parents new bathroom and vote: three bathetic acts of heroism that couldn't better befit a band leader so wedded to the absurd and the glorious.
