Titus Andronicus

Reminder: NAG Benefit @ Glasslands tomorrow

16 days ago

Hey gang. This is just to remind you that we will be performing tomorrow night at Glasslands Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, near the intersection of s 2nd and kent, just around the corner from Death by Audio. The concert is a benefit for a very admirable organization of local activists called Neighbors Allied for Good Growth, or NAG for short, who have been protecting North Brooklyn from the cruel march of "progress" for sixteen years now, whether taking the form of their legendary battle with and victory over a garbage incinerator to the contemporary concern of greedy over-development and so forth. A very worthy cause indeed, say we. Learn more about the group at their website, nag-brooklyn.org. We will be performing with Bad Credit No Credit, one of the scene's very finest up-and-coming bands, and Bottle Up & Go, who I don't really know anything about, but I am sure they are very good. As this is, for all intents and purposes, the first show of our Fall 2010 North American tour, it will be yr first opportunity to observe our up-to-date repertoire; forgotten favorites will abound, the perfect antidote, we hope, to all you who grow weary of the same old T. Andronicus setlist. Tickets will be fifteen dollars, the entire proceeds going to NAG. You can buy tickets here if you are really feeling saucy. The show is for people twenty-one and over - sorry, we know that is lame, but that is the rule at Glasslands, and if you underagers really want to see us, there are still plenty of tickets left for our show at Webster Hall on the 25th of September. Okay, great. See you tomorrow night!
Yr friend,
Patrick

TV Party

30 days ago

Hello friends. It is with great wonder that we announce to you now that our humble rock and roll band will performing this Thursday night on reputable network television program Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Yes, for three and a half glorious minutes, Titus Andronicus will invade the living rooms of America, sweep out all the cobwebs of our bankrupt society and replace them with the seeds of a glimmering punk utopia. Right? The show will air on the National Broadcasting Company, which was Channel 4 the last time I checked, at 12:30 am - also appearing will be "Rescue Me" star and singer-songwriter behind perrenial classic "Asshole," Dennis Leary, a man as smart and funny as Dennis Miller and as subversive and challenging as Timothy Leary, or something like that.

So yeah - that should be pretty interesting. You can be a part of this historic event too, if you so please. There is such a thing on the show as a "band bench," I have learned - the musicians perform on a stage which is unlike the stages we usually perform on, in that there is standing room for the audience above, rather than below, the performer. It can be you that has this bird's eye view on the proceedings, if you follow the instructions at this here website. I encourage strongly all of you Titus Andronicus fans to join in, lest we be surrounded by ambivalent tourists fresh out of Mars 2112 or the ESPN Zone or whatever it is.

I'll say this about Jimmy Fallon. He was never exactly my favorite Saturday Night Live cast member (though he certainly got his share of chuckles out of me) and I don't like how he made fun of my favorite local coffee shop, Cafe Grumpy (where I sit even as we speak), when they made available a $12 cup of coffee (as though he had never spent as much or more on an equally or more frivoulous item, but I guess that's comedy, right?). He did do one thing, though, that I thought was pretty remarkable. Remember the big fuss back in 2008 when the race for the White House was in full swing, Tina Fey did her seminal impression of Sarah Palin, and a lot of people theorized that this impression, as it was so convincing, did much to sway the public's perception of the real Sarah Palin? And remember how this raised so many questions about our post-modern condition and the ever-widening gap between public perception and reality and all this? Well, that was certainly an impressive feat by Tina Fey, but I believe that Jimmy Fallon did it first, albeit on a smaller scale - think of him as John the Baptist to Fey's Jesus. I am referring, of course, to the classic Celebrity Jeopardy skit wherein Fallon played Adam Sandler. This is a post-modern quaqmire to begin with, as Sandler too was an SNL cast member, and it could easily be argued that Fallon was his aesthetic successor. What made this skit, and Fallon's performance, so special was how, to my friends and I, at least, it successfully inserted itself into the "Sandler canon," if you will. I speak not of his films or his many great sketches on SNL or even his underrated and still-enjoyable comedy albums, but rather, the long, rich succession of one-liners and catch phrases, which have been repeated ad infinitum by youngsters for decades now. There are too many to list, but you know what I am talking about - "That's something that could have been brought to my attention YESTERDAY!" "That's quacktastic!" or even the humble, "GOOO!" In today's world, where Twitter and Facebook and all of our "youth technologies" scramble to compress our Earthly existence into bite-sized, instantly digestable nuggets, perhaps it is this sort of canon that will be the greatest indicator of an "artist's" success. Anyway. Fallon, as Sandler, had two dynamite moments - the first was when he said, in a voice which began in a bumbling mumble and crescendoed into a manic bellow in classic Sandler fashion, "One time I was out with my friends on a boat and this guy on the boat was, like, 'COME TO THE BACK OF THE BOAT!'" The second was his answer in Final Jeopardy - "Abby dooby." Both these things are funny things to say, in their own right, and can stand alone as funny things, but in the years that followed, as my friends and I indulged in our favorite Adam Sandler quotes, it was easier to insert these particular "Sandler" quotes, even though Sandler himself had never spoken them - they became as common as "Nudie magazine day!" or "He spit in the cooler." I guess the point I am trying to make is this - when James Bond says something like, "You know what I can do with my little finger," it doesn't really matter that much whether it is Daniel Craig saying it or Pierce Brosnan or Sean Connery or whoever else, in much the same way that when "Sarah Palin" says something foolish on Saturday Night Live, it might not make much of a difference to the public whether it was Sarah Palin or Tina Fey saying it, just as it didn't matter whether it was Sandler or Fallon doing "Sandler." Is it true that actors, or any public figures, though they are human beings, are becoming characters? Becoming recognizable "brands" that are not necessarily attached for all time to their human progenitors? It would seem that Jimmy Fallon proved it was so, by doing "Sandler" as well as Sandler, by the standards of the "canon" discussed above. Whoo, kind of a roundabout way to say that, no?

Speaking of Tina Fey, there is something I have been meaning to tell you for a while. On an episode of "30 Rock" from last season, entitled "Argus," the Jenna Maroney character describes a new boyfriend, saying that he "works for a bankrupt circus." This immediately brought to mind the Silver Jews song "Horseleg Swastikas," from their great 2001 album Bright Flight
, wherein David Berman sings of "working for a bankrupt circus on the wrong side of Saturday Night." Of course, I immediately reached out to my pal Andrew Cedermark, who is as much of a Silver Jews fan as myself, and pointed out that David Berman and Tina Fey had in common the distinction of having graduated from the University of Virginia, he in 1989, and she in 1992, making for one year of them sharing the campus. Did they ever meet? Ever develop a friendship? Or perhaps even a romance? Or did Tina Fey learn of Berman as a common UVA grad and develop a long-lasting appreciation for the Silver Jews that would result in such an allusion? Maybe none of these things, and it is just a coincidence. I dunno, just something to think about.

Okay, so, what else is going on. Thanks to all of you for snatching up all the tickets to our show with Free Energy at Maxwell's on the 19th of August. With luck, we'll soon surpass Luna as the Band to Have Sold Out the Second Most Shows at Maxwell's (no sense in trying to compete with Yo La Tengo). There are still tickets available for our August 18th show at Glasslands Gallery in Brooklyn, where we will play with Bad Credit No Credit and Bottle Up and Go. The show is a benefit for Neighbors Allied for Good Growth, so please come and support this very worthy cause.

Still more tickets are available yet for our show at Webster Hall on September 25th. This show is also with Free Energy, and the last show where we will potentially be selling a limited-edition, tour-only seven inch, which has us on one side and Free Energy on the other. Our contribution is a cover of "Anixety Block" by Television Personalities, from their wonderfully rewarding record They Could've Been Bigger than the Beatles, while Free Energy gives us their version of the highly underrated Bruce Springsteen tune "I'm Going Down," from the nigh-perfect B-side of Born In the USA (Sorry, Sarim, but "My Hometown" is just not it). I think there are going to be, like, three to five hundred of these things. Surely no record collection will be complete without one. This is an exciting prospect, though listening to our side makes me a little sad, for it is one of just two recordings made by the short-lived Titus Andronicus 4.0, which included Andrew Cedermark and Ian O'Neil on guitars. Man, imagine what that group might have accomplished. Oh well, onward and upward.

All right, I guess that is all for now. Must go and meet my friend Kevin, for an afternoon of playing Guitar Hero. Woo hoo! See you soon.

Yr friend,
Patrick

Summer Wears Pt. 1

57 days ago

The untold story of last nights Wavves' afterparty @ Shea Stadium

69 days ago

Okay, gang - if you guys keep up with the blogs that talk about indie rock and the like, maybe you have heard about how last night's party at Shea Stadium, celebrating the success of the performance by Wavves, Dom and Cloud Nothings at the Knitting Factory earlier that evening, hit an enormous snag when some rascal threw a bottle off of Shea's scenic balcony and shattered the back window of a police car. Believe it or not, I was scheduled to act as a DJ at this party, sharing wheels-of-steel duties with Ryan Schrieber of Pitchfork Media fame. I arrived late due to various public transit mishaps, as the police were seemingly just cooling down from their earlier rage(and who could really blame them?), and were on their way out. It looked at this point like the party might be DOA - the organizers were unsure if there was going to be any sort of DJing at all, which was annoying to me because I had schlepped all of my pedals and my four track and so on (I use these when I DJ, for reasons that are still unclear) all the way from Greenpoint, which isn't the end of the world or anything, but not the sort of thing I do at one am for my health. Whatever the fate of the party, those few who were still in attendance seemed to be in a big hurry to get out. Before long, Shea Stadium held probably not more than ten or twelve humans, myself included, and Ryan Schrieber was nowhere to be seen.

Once things were quiet and peaceful enough, Adam Riech, the great guy who runs the space, allowed me to set up my stuff, probably mostly out of pity, and I did my thing for about twenty minutes to an audience of maybe four or five. Ryan Schrieber turned up again too, and spun a good mix of 80's and early 90's indie classics, leaning heavily on ethical punk - "Merchandise," "Rebel Girl," "This Ain't No Picnic," etc. The six or seven people listening to him looked to be having a great time, and even I couldn't deny it when he dropped "Self Esteem" by the Offspring at around 4 am or so. That song is just timeless.

Adam, Alex from the So So Glos and I talked for a long time that night about how much it sucks when people try and do good things for the kids, only to have one of those kids end up pissing all over it and ruining it for everybody, and I suppose I could go on and on about how the kids are all such dumbasses and want nothing more than to act as such and start trouble even though they have great guys like Adam doing so much to entertain them, but, well, hasn't that already been said time and again? [Also, wow, what a run-on sentence! Been reading too much William Faulkner, or just a dumbass myself?]

So, in the name of focusing on the positive, let me share with you some of the happy memories I have of that evening - clicking the link below will allow you to download a recording of my set which I did on the aforementioned tape recorder. Music by Professor Green, Ben Kweller, Surfer Blood, Weezer, EMF and Barenaked Ladies, spoken word by Tracy Morgan, from his awesome audiobook, I Am the New Black. Live "remixing" by yr boy. I also included, as a special bonus, a cover version of "You Shook Me All Night Long" by AC/DC that I performed this afternoon at Shea for an audience of just two - Eric and Sean, two of the people behind the great internet TV series The Flavorpill Fix.

Patrick Stickles Live @ Shea Stadium

Point is, don't be afraid of Shea Stadium! It is a great place to hang out and enjoy yrself, and we can have it to enjoy if only we show the minimum of necessary respect to Adam and all the other people who help run the space, the neighbors, and the fuzz. It isn't that hard, you dumb kids! Why not let the healing begin tonight? The So So Glos, the Beets, Asa Ransom and Electric Tickle Machine are all playing, and one other band too, I think. Don't forget either about seeing our main man Andrew Cedermark play there tomorrow night, along with our other big bro Ducktails. Go there with an open heart and even the littlest bit of basic human decency, and you will have the time of yr life, believe me.

Okay, that's it for now. See you tomorrow at Newtown Barge Park, right?

Yr friend,
Patrick

The MONITOUR Phase Four: "A New Birth of Free(Energy)dom, plus Phase Three and other Friendship Updates

72 days ago

Hello dear friends. It is our distinct pleasure, this day, to announce what will likely be the last leg of the proper "Monitour," the ongoing promotional exercise behind our latest record, The Monitor. Monitor + tour = "Monitour," remember? Thus far, it has taken us all over these United States, and over a reasonable chunk of Western Europe, and this Autumn, we will fumble across the beautiful American landscape once more to entertain you. A daunting task, we know, for yr palate is sophisticated and yr standards elevated. You deserve the best, and happily for us, we have been able to enlist five of the most entertaining and straight up party rocking young people in all of rock and roll to travel with us and spread the good news about the electric guitar. Who could I be referring to but Philadelphia's number one neo-classic rockers Free Energy?

Our relationship with Free Energy goes all the way back to the Autumn of 2009, when we had just completed our "Bring on the Dudes" tour with our BFFs the So So Glos. We agreed to tack on a show at Georgetown University in DC at the end of the tour. Naturally, after forty or so days of slugging it out on the American indie rock circuit (and putting up with all the SSG's antics), we were dead tired and ready for an evening of zombie-esque behavior. This was until the opening act at the show, a group we had never heard of before and assumed must have been made up of Georgetown students who tinkered with guitars between their Poli-Sci midterms or whatever, began kicking out the tastiest grooves and melting our faces with the sort of badass guitar wizardry that we had always assumed to be only the stuff of legend.

Mutterings of, "Hey, these guys aren't bad," quickly turned into MySpace visits during personal time, which turned into the Free Energy MySpace becoming the official party playlist of me and my roommates, to breathlessly anticipated concerts at Brooklyn Bowl, to show-flier-on-the-refrigerator declarations of superfandom. Next thing I knew, I was waiting on line for the bathroom at the Rolling Stone SXSW showcase gushing to Paul, their singer, about how much Free Energy, and especially their self-titled anthem, had taken over my music-listening life. That night, Titus Andronicus 6.0 forged our friendship forever in the fires of a Free Energy dance-a-thon. Here's a video of them doing their thing that magical night, along with an informative interview.



Soon, an advance cassette of their fantastic debut, Stuck on Nothing, was on permanent rotation in Blue Thunder, a rare-consensus builder in the often highly partisan world of Titus Andronicus Van Music Selection. Endless debates about the true meaning of the lyrics to "Bang Pop" (Suicide? Achieving long-sought sexual nirvana by doing it with an alien? Innocent popcorn making?) ensued, and before long, I would put money on the Titus Andronicus chapter of the Free Energy Fan Club being among the most active and enthusiastic. Stuck on Nothing was indisputably THE soundtrack of the first phase of our MONITOUR, and now for the last, we have the men that made it. Absolutely fantastic. Here are the dates - those were Free Energy will join us are marked with an asterix.

08-21 Boston, MA - Royale *
08-22 Montreal, Quebec - Il Motore *
08-23 Ottowa, Ontario - Mavericks *
08-25 Ithaca, NY - Castaways *
08-26 Columbus, OH - Summit
08-27 Toledo, OH - Mickey Finn's
08-28 St. Louis, MO - LouFest
08-29 Memphis, TN - Hi Tone
08-30 Little Rock, AR - Rev Room
08-31 Dallas, TX - Sons of Hermann Hall
09-10 Vancouver, British Columbia - Biltmore Cabaret *
09-11 Portland, OR - Backspace / MusicFest NW
09-12 Seattle, WA - Tractor Tavern
09-13 Boise, ID - Neurolux *
09-14 Salt Lake City, UT - Kilby Court
09-15 Denver, CO - Bluebird
09-16 Omaha, NE - Waiting Room *
09-17 Minneapolis, MN - Triple Rock Social Club
09-19 Newport, KY - Southgate House *
09-20 Atlanta, GA - The Earl *
09-21 Durham, NC - Duke Coffeehouse *
09-22 Charlottesville, VA - Jefferson Theatre *
09-23 Philadelphia, PA - First Unitarian Church *
09-24 Washington, DC - Rock and Roll Hotel *

We have some more of these to announce soon, so don't get yr knickers in a twist if it doesn't seem like we are coming to yr town - it is definitely within the realm of possibility that we have a few more tricks up our sleeve, and we are just unable to talk about it right now for whatever silly reason that probably doesn't have anything to do with indie rock. Soon enough, my pretties.

Information about any age restrictions on these shows can be found on our MySpace. The shows in Atlanta, Boise and San Francisco are 21+, a fact of which we are not proud and somewhat ashamed, but I am afraid there is very little that we can do about it. Underagers, don't worry - we are going to half ass those performances big time (Hey, legal adults - I am just kidding, we are gonna rock), so don't sweat it. Any other age restrictions would be in the 18+ category, or 19+ in Canada. The shows in Toledo, Newport, and Durham can all be yrs for less than ten dollars. I put the ticket prices up on MySpace as well, but they are all for the advance sales - if you buy yrs the day of the show, it may be two dollars more. I don't know, man - data entry is pretty soul-destroying, and the new interface for entering show info on MySpace is way shittier than the old one was. Also, isn't it funny that the only way I can think to make a difference in that sphere is to start a FACEBOOK group called "Bring back the old MySpace show info entry interface" or something? The world, circa 2010, is a bizarre and often frightening place.

Well, as long as we are talking about tour dates and bands that we love, let's speak a little bit about the little-blogged Phase Three of the MONITOUR, which doesn't really have a funny name like the other three did. I can only be so funny, you know? Anyway, this leg of the tour is going to be an especially short one, but especially epic in spite of its brevity, for we are going to be joined by some of our oldest associates, Boston's finest indie rock band Hallelujah the Hills. We have been tight with Jah Hills for a few years now, and various members have made considerable contributions to both The Monitor and The Airing of Grievances, but we've only played together a handful of times - at South Union Arts in Chicago on our first tour ever, at a Brooklyn DIY space called Loftasaurus Rex, a bowling alley in Jamaica Plain, and twice at Great Scott in Allston, MA, once in 2008 with Times New Viking and earlier this year with the Babies. Thankfully, this year's Pitchfork Festival gave us just the push we needed to correct this flaw of history. All the below dates will feature Hallelujah the Hills both as the opening act (save for the P4k Festival itself), and as auxiliary members of Titus Andronicus, helping to give a touch of class to our sound by means of cello, trumpet, and additional luxurious keyboards. Whoa, that is gonna be sick.

07-10 New Haven, CT - Lily's Pad
07-11 Northampton, MA - Pearl Street
07-12 Albany, NY - Valentines
07-13 Buffalo, NY - Ninth Ward
07-14 Toronto, Ontario - Horseshoe Tavern
07-15 Grand Rapids, MI - Intersection Lounge
07-16 Chicago, IL - Subterranean (Pitchfork Music Festival Afterparty)
07-17 Chicago, IL - Pitchfork Music Festival

It is fitting for Jah Hills to join us for these dates, as they have long been ardent supporters of and allies to our cause. On a personal note, you may have heard that the narrative of The Monitor deals in part with a period in my life when I lived in Somerville, MA, a town typically lumped into Greater Boston. Well, this is true, and when I lived there, the men of Hallelujah the Hills were very literally my only friends. It was actually pretty pathetic. Actually, it was awesome, because they are great guys - they even allowed me to play some relatively un-classy guitar on their fantastic song "You Better Hope You (Die Before Me)," on their most recent album, Colonial Drones, recorded at the Soul Shop in Medford, where bits of The Monitor was recorded and... well, I could go on and on and on, weaving a dense and intricate web to illustrate to you just how interconnected Titus Andronicus and Hallelujah the Hills have been and will be, but by now, you probably get the picture. Take this shit seriously - Jah Hills obviously are, as they have posted two new songs for you to download for free in preparation for yr mind to be blown by them at the aforementioned concerts. If you decide you really love it, they are playing headlining concerts at Great Scott in Allston on 7/8 and Union Hall in Brooklyn on 7/9. Get on it!

All right, as we start to wind down this blog, let me remind you that this coming Saturday, we in Titus Andronicus will be performing at the annual Northside Festival, which celebrates all things North Brooklyn (or NoBro, as I have taken to calling it) and indie rock. If you haven't already heard, we will be playing the first ever concert at Greenpoint's Newtown Barge Park with Cults and our big homies Male Bonding, who really lived up to the promise of their name and became our dear friends upon running into them several times on our last Euro Trip. Did I forget to drop a "Hot Video Alert" on their jam, "Year's Not Long?" Well, if I did, then fucking Hot Video Alert!



Extra props for making optimal use of indie rock sex symbol extraordinaire Juan Vigoda, as you've never seen (but definitely imagined) him before. Yum! Anyway, that show is gonna be sick. It starts at 1:00 PM, because at 4:00 PM, we gotta hand over the reins to the still-undisputed kings (and queen) of twenty-first-century punk rock, Fucked Up, who are doing a show of their own at the very same location with Liars and High Places. Neat!

Don't stay too long though, because two of the most luminous graduates of the mid-'00s Bergen County scene are playing at Brooklyn's Shea Stadium that night, erstwhile TA guitarist and best bro for life Andrew Cedermark, and Ridgewood, NJ's Matthew Mondanile, aka DuckTails. Don't get caught sleeping on that show! Get jazzed about it by watching this video of Andrew and his crack band, Buffalo Wild Wing, playing "Ad Infinitum," the opening salvo from his forthcoming debut LP, Moon Deluxe. I remember fondly playing the keyboards on this song in a short-lived, Andrew-fronted band called The Mighty Oak way way back in 2006. Those were the days. So young and beautiful, we were. Anyway.



I feel like I am going to have a lot more to say about Andrew soon, which is probably going to fit into some larger discussion of my friends from high school and what their music has meant to me throughout the years and what it has come to mean now and will mean in the future and so on... who knows. Point is - go to that concert. Hell, go to all three of those concerts. Also, the So So Glos play Shea the night before - go to that too. Might have something to announce for the night before THAT, as well, though not any sort of Titus Andronicus concert or anything.

All right, that is more than enough for now. See you on Saturday! Take care.

Yr friend,
Patrick