Titus Andronicus

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

22/06/10

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

A More Perfect Union (Official Music Video)

12/06/10

Additional entertainment

21/05/10

I almost forgot - you have probably been listening to The Monitor non-stop for about two months now, and The Airing of Grievances for about two years, stopping only to listen to The Monitor, and, well, you are probably understandably exhausted. Happily, two "new" (or new-ish) packages of Titus Andronicus music ae now available for you, for free!

Firstly, the internet's greatest Titus Andronicus website TitusAndronic.Us has posted for download a compilation of some "rarities" - b-sides, songs from out-of-print seven inches, live recordings, etc., from our early years entitled The Feats of Strength. This is funny for me, because every holiday, my cousin Connor suggests to me that The Feats of Strength has to be the name of our next album. Now I finally have a proper excuse for him! Frankly, part of me wishes at least one of the songs on this compilation would have never seen the light of day (cuz it suxx), but that is okay. It is still cool. It sort of reminds me of Naked Baby Photos by Ben Folds Five, although it doesn't have any songs as good as "The Ultimate Sacrifice." Download the compilation here, and tell all yr friends, "See? I told you they sucked!"

A slightly more up-to-date representation of the sort of noises we make has been made available by that always great internet resource NYC Taper. This great guy made a good quality recording of our most recent show at Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ, and you can download it here. It has all the hits on it, and us playing "Waking Up Drunk" by the Spider Bags WITH the Spider Bags! Neat! One disclaimer: on the site, it says that I told Greg (the NYC taper himself) that this show would be a good one to record. That wasn't what I said. What I said was that the show was probably going to be a lot better sounding than the last one that he taped, which sounded like shit. Don't go looking for that one. You should peruse the site though, and check it frequently - great recordings get posted all the time. I am especially fond of listening to their recording of our pals the Babies at Glasslands a few months ago. Great!

Of course, all this is moot until you get yr fill of watching the new Free Energy video, which, if you are like me, will be never. Great video? Or greatest video? Both, of course!

Bang Pop

FREE ENERGY | MySpace Music Videos

These guys are opening for Juliette Lewis in Paris tonight, something we did last night. I could say a lot of stuff about that concert, and I really want to, but I won't. Okay, gotta go now. Take care.

Yr friend,
Patrick

MONITOUR spiel pt. 2, plus North American YouTube Wrap-Up

19/05/10

Hello friends. Greetings from Ghent, Belgium. I know it has been a long time since we have spoken here - some 55 days or so. It isn't because I don't care about you - things have just been busy lately, and time is always finding new and better ways of slipping through my fingers. I'm sorry - I shall try to be more dilligent. I have detailed some of our adventures in a tour diary for the website of Paste magazine - you can read the most recent of those (which itself isn't all that recent) here. I will write another one soon to close the book on the tour that it is concerned with, which I would just do now, but this Belgian keyboard on which I am typing has got me totally baffled, mostly because the A is where I think the Q should be, and vice versa. Crazy! Should you ever get tired of waiting for me to get it together, our always quotable guitarist Amy has got plenty of her thoughts flooding the internet these days - you can hear a lot more about our adventures, among other things, by reading her Twitter or Tumblr. Hey, those two words kind of sound alike! I wonder. She also made a very fine record called "For the Sky" under the name Solanin which you can listen to and learn all about here. Yes, Amy's control of the internet is truly masterful, though she doesn't embed enough YouTube videos for my taste. After all, isn't that what blogging is really all about?

So, as I said, we are in Belgium now. Ghent is a nice city, a college town; some 60,000 students live and learn here. Probably a nice place to do so - lots of nice castles and old churches and other such architectural jewels. I got the pleasure of listening to two older gentlemen, who had a violin and an accordion, play such chestnuts as "Down by the Riverside" and "If I Were A Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof - very pleasant listening. I also saw some kids fencing in full regalia - that is something young kids do over here, it seems! Our concert here last night was kinda cool. We played with a local band of youths who called themselves the Curvy Cuties Fanclub. Here is a video of them playing their song, "Nasty Sound."



We have been on this continent for about a week now. We arrived in London a few days prior to any scheduled concerts, onstensibly to speak to the press or something, though very little like that actually materialized (priceless video-game playing-ti,e squandered!). We did, however, go to see a concert by popular British rock group the Big Pink. You have to understand - the Big Pink's knob-twiddler or "electronics player," or "Knight of the Square Table," as our boy Pete would call him, is one of the owners of our British record label, Merok, and so when we are in London, he generously lets us stay at his house in Dallston (where Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher of Crass apparently now live, though I haven't seen either of them around). So yeah - we went to go see the Big Pink play at this greqt big concert hall and there were lots and lots of strobe lights and fog machines and all that sorta thing. It was pretty cool when they covered "100%" by Sonic Youth, so here is a video of them doing just that, though at a different concert.



The real news of our stay in London, though, was Double Dagger, beloved heroes of Baltimore and truly one of the greatest punk bands in the world. Of late, I have been enormously enjoying their new EP, Masks, available now from the good people at Thrill Jockey. In what is becoming a recurring motif, it is another massive leap forward in DubbDagg's artistry, simultaneously growing in both melodicism and intensity, with their messages becoming directer and more effective. All in all, a great little slab of badass rock. As happy as I was to welcome this music into my life, I was equally upset to learn that I had recently slept on a DubbDagg concert at Death by Audio which occurred a couple of weeks ago, so when I found out that we would have the opportunity to see the band make their London debut on one of the nights where we had no other obligations, of course I just about jumped out of my skin with excitement. Indeed, they did not disappoint. The whole climate of the performance was exemplary of DubbDagg's magical powers - the audience started out happy to reinforce stereotypes of London punters, with their arms-folding, "prove it" sort of attitude, but between the gnarly riffs and Nolen's extremely confrontational stage presence, it wasn't long at all before the room was a tornado of sweaty glee. Mirabile visu! Truly, Double Dagger doesn't take "no" for an answer, and thank God for that. Besides that, the company of the men in the band was as pleasurable as ever (did you forget that Nolen designed the artwork for our most recent album?), and we all enjoyed the adventures on the steel wheels of DJ Genuine Guy, who kept us dancing the night away. Awesome. Haven't seen any videos online from this concert, but that is probably because the DubbDagg live experience is so engrossing and visceral that trying to capture it on yr cell phone is as fruitless as trying to catch lightning in a bottle. I did see that someone dared a couple nights previous in Cardiff, so here they are, performing "Surrealist Composition With Your Face," from last year's excellent long-player More.



Speaking of Double Dagger, I saw the film Hype recently, a documentary about the alternative rock explosion that consumed Seattle, WA in the early nineties. Remember that? No, me neither. Anyway, one of the artists featured in the film was a group not from Seattle, but rather Olympia, called Some Velvet Sidewalk. At first glimpse, they seemed to have a lot in common with DubbDagg. Observe:



I had read that in DubbDagg's press materials for Masks, they list 74 bands they have been compared to in the press, so I was sure that I'd find this Some Velvet Sidewalk band somewhere on that list, since the similarities were obvious - manic, bespectacled man fronting a bass-and-drums duo who play badass riffs. They weren't on the list though, so either I was smarter than any journalist on Earth, or there was more to this Some Velvet Sidewalk than met the eye. I did some more research, and it turns out, their other music doesn't really sound like Double Dagger at all, but that is okay, for it totally rocks all the same. You know how indie rock historians are always talking about the Olympia-DC axis? That's fair enough, ideologically speaking, but Some Velvet Sidewalk actually makes noises that suggest a cross-pollination of musical ideas as well. To me, they bridge the K Records and mid-80's Dischord aesthetics pretty seamlessly, combining great earnestness with typical K foppishness... or something like that! Fuck if I know. Their song "Peel" should demonstrate what I mean, in addition to totally rocking you.



Okay, that kicked ass. Speaking of kicking ass, when arriving in the Netherlands, we got to play a show with the Canadian band Think About Life, who I had seen open for Wolf Parade several years earlier. They didn't sound very much the same, but they were still pretty cool, and their singer, Martin, was one of the most affable fellows you'd ever like to meet. What a ray of sunshine that guy was! In honor of his kindness, and in remembrance of the group's earlier sound, now largely abandoned, here's a video of them performing their song "Paul Cries," which used to be my jam back in the day.



A couple of days later, our paths crossed with "alt-bro" phenoms Surfer Blood, which was cool, because we spent a lot of time around the house listening to their record when it came out. Sweet. We played a concert with them in Amsterdam, and a good time was had by all. They were real nice fellows. So young! The world is truly their oyster, and they played a new song which was easily the equal of the material on their album - looks like everything is falling into place for Surfer Blood. Good luck, lads. Here's a video of that new song as performed at the concert.



Well, that's pretty much the scoop. In Paris, we will play a concert with Juliette Lewis, of Natural Born Killers fame. Wild, huh? Before we go though, let me share with you the three most beloved "viral videos" of our North American tour. Man, are they awesome. Enjoy!

3. Slack-Jawed Cat Can't Believe Its Eyes



2. "OOBE: Out of Body Experience" by Joe Sandler



1. "A Glorious Dawn" by Carl Sagan f/ Stephen Hawking



Those videos started out funny, but then they turned out to be just awesomely life-affirming. Fuck yeah. Okay, let's speak soon. Take care now.

Yr friend,
Patrick

MONITOUR Spiel pt. 1, plus Manifest Destiny, plus MONITOUR Phase Three: "Farewell to the Star-Spangled Banner"

25/03/10

Hello, my little chickadees. Greetings from West End Espresso and Tea, a very fine coffee shop in the very fine little city of San Luis Obispo, CA. Today is day eighteen of the MONITOUR, which has proven to be every bit the magical adventure that we had been hoping it would be. There is much to cover, so let us not mince words. After all, brevity is the soul of wit, so here we go!

Firstly, it is with enormous excitement that we announce the MONITOUR fulfilling its destiny (its manifest destiny, as it were), for now we can finally declare that we have closed all the gaps in our schedule and made our "childish obsession with not taking days off," as my father calls it, a reality. The final shows added to the MONITOUR itinerary are as follows: On March 29th, we will be playing a house show at 540 Van Buren Street in Eugene, OR. Okay, great! Then, on April 3rd, and this is really fucking awesome, we will be playing at The Retired and Enlisted Association in Rapid City, SOUTH DAKOTA! That's right, baby - we are hitting both Dakotas on this tour. Rapid City is also a short twenty minutes from MOUNT RUSHMORE - hello!! That is going to be the bomb, even if it means two ten hour drives right in a row. Who cares, right? This puts the totality of the American MONITOUR at 54 shows in 48 days. You heard it here first, kids - taking it easy is totally bunk!

Yes, there is no doubt about it - America is a many-splendored paradise. Yet, though we love America the most, we acknowledge the needs of punks the world around to be entertained, and with that, it is our distinct pleasure to announce what will be the final leg of the MONITOUR, roughly two weeks of high-octane rock and roll madness on our second favorite continent, Europe, leading up to and including the Primavera Sound Festival in Barcelona, which we have already heard about (remember? Pavement?). On this tour, we will be taking a couple of days off, because Europe is a huge and baffling continent. Those shows are as follows:

5/15/2010 - Utrecht, ND - Da Helling - Club Radar
5/16/2010 - Rotterdam, ND - Rotown
5/17/2010 - Amsterdam, ND - Bitterzoet (w/Surfer Blood)
5/18/2010 - Gent, Belgium - Charlatan
5/20/2010 - Paris, FR - La Fleche D'or
5/21/2010 - Liverpool, UK - Sound City Festival
5/22/2010 - Glasgow, UK - Stag and Dagger Festival
5/23/2010 - Leeds, UK - Cockpit 2
5/24/2010 - Manchester, UK - Ruby Lounge
5/25/2010 - London, UK - City and Arts Project

and of course...

5/27/2010 - Barcelona, Spain - Primavera Sound Festival w/ PAVEMENT

Okay, that sounds like it is gonna be a total gas! As is our way, we throw ourselves at yr feet, at the mercy of yr generosity, our European comrades, and ask that perhaps you consider inviting us over to yr house after the show to let us sleep on the floor. Europe is a nice continent, but yr hotels are soul-destroying. If I never set foot in another Etap again, it will be much too soon (although we have stayed at some nice ones in the Netherlands, admittedly). If you can find it in yr heart to assist us in this, we will gladly let you and yr friend come to the show for free. E-mail TitusAndronicusTheBand@Gmail.com if you are interested.

Okay, so... what else is going on. As you may know, we began this tour by making a series of appearances in some of America's more admirable independent record stores, and that was a lot of fun. I gotta tell ya, when I was first told about this idea, I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever heard. Historically, I have always hated playing in record stores - so awkward! I was pretty sure this whole record store trip was going to be pure punishment, but I am happy to admit that I was dead wrong - it was actually a ton of fun! Wheee! Here is us having some of that awesome fun at Ear X-Tacy in Louisville, KY, a great store, and workplace of the friendliest man who has ever lived, our new friend Sean. What up, Sean!!


Yeah, it was pretty fun, all right. Thanks to all the folks who came out to see us, and all the great people at all the stores for treating us with so much kindness and respect. Top drawer, everybody! Another awesome thing was, because we were mostly playing in the afternoon or early evening, our nights were free to do whatever we pleased. This usually meant going to bed at a reasonable hour, but when we were in Chicago, we delighted to learn that our old buddies Ted Leo and the Pharmacists were playing a concert! Thanks to those guys for getting us in and entertaining us so thoroughly. I also had the distinct honor of singing a couple songs with the band, another one of those things that would make my teenage brain explode. Here is the last song of the night, "Angelfuck" by the Misfits, a very appropriate thing since earlier that day, no less a reputable source than the New York Times published a very nice article about the state of indie rock and roll in New Jersey, using our two bands as subjects! Wow! The Misfits are from New Jersey too, you have to understand. Bon appetit:


There is another video floating around the internet of this same crew playing "Merchandise" by Fugazi with this guy named Ralph, but I shall not post that here because Ralph is a much better singer and dancer than myself. A quite similar scenario played itself out the following night in St. Louis, MO, where we played a last-minute, "secret" show with our buddies Deer Tick, starring erstwhile Titus Andronicus guitarist and once-and-future best bro Ian O'Neil. They generously invited me onstage with them to help sing "Authority Song" by John Mellancamp. It looked pretty much exactly like this:


We also played a couple of normal concerts, which were pretty cool too. One of those was in Athens, OH - here's a picture of us just pretty much hanging out there, because that is something which we really do. Hanging out, I mean.


Damn, that shit is real! We played in Tulsa, OK too, which was also cool. After the show, we stayed with some more super-nice acquaintances of ours, Bart and Emily, who were very accommodating, and whose company was extremely agreeable. Serious Titusheads will remember them as the people whose hamster we buried in Episode 4 of Titus TV, "Super Maximum Overdrive." They had a funny ash-tray man made out of a beer can and a bunch of bottle caps, who had a funny penis that could be revealed to hilarious effect. Look at this thing:


They also had a pretty badass tree fort out back, which you can see below, with Ian standing on it like a true king. Dust yr shoulders off, Ian!


So yeah, phase one of the MONITOUR pretty much went like that. Let us move on, then, to that event which indie rocks nationwide look forward to every year with the sort of feverish anticipation usually reserved for kiddies awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus, the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin, TX (hereafter referred to simply as SXSW). We had a lot of fun at this conference last year, but this year was even more of a blast. Is it okay if I tell you all about it now? Okay, I will!

Perhaps the best way to understand our experience objectively would be to read this great article, written by our new friend Patrick Caldwell, which details the excruciating minutae of our daily lives, in this case, on the day of March the 18th. It ran the following day in the Austin Statesman, and there are some cool pictures for you to look at here.

Early that sweltering Texas morning, we had the opportunity to break bread with some of the brass up at Extra Large Recordings, including our main man Kris Chen, who, as luck would have it, was wearing a shirt identical to Ian's! Look at these awesome twins, and understand that much better the strength of our bond.


Another serious highlight of our time in Austin was playing with the great band Free Energy at the Rolling Stone showcase. I have seen them a couple of times previously, but on this night, they were really blazing. Totally awesome. They also hooked us up with a cassette of their fantastic album, Stuck on Nothing, which has gone into extremely heavy rotation in Blue Thunder. I couldn't find any videos of that particular performance, so here is them kicking some other asses at a different show. I mean, it is pretty much the same shit, right? Just enjoy.


I also must say that it was a distinct honor to play not one but two shows with the greatest punk band of our young century, Fucked Up, one of which was their own showcase at Red 7. Maybe the most "fucked up" thing about this band is how nice they are, even though their music is so intense and often terrifying! They really treated us very kindly and had us feeling wicked good following all of our interactions. Thanks, Fucked Up! Annoyingly enough, our busy schedule precluded actually seeing them play at either of the shows we played together, but happily, our ace booking agent John Chavez, who also books FU, was able to get us into their performance at the Fader Fort on Thursday, where we all delighted in seeing them tear it up. Here they are playing "Son the Father," the opening salvo on their brain-melting masterpiece, Chemistry of Common Life.


So, what else did we do... some of the conference's corporate sponsors had some sort of rocker oasis set up on 6th Street, where we were rewarded for a brief interview with all the snacks we could eat and all the ping pong we could play. Here are Amy and Ian going at it:


Sadly, I was too out of breath to enjoy any of this as much as I might have, as I had just run to and from a performance by Demolished Thoughts, an 80's hardcore cover band fronted by Thurston Moore and featuring J Masic and Jonah from Fucked Up on guitar and bass, respectively. Two other people were in the band too, but shit if I know who they were. Here is this awesome band playing "I Hate Sports" by 7 Seconds, from their epochal seven inch, Skins, Brains and Guts.


Back at the place with the ping pong, Eric captured Dave in quite a candid moment of badass behavior, dramatically removing his coat ala Neo from The Matrix. We sure do get a kick out of this picture, and we hope you do, too!


Well, that is enough about that particular conference. Let us discuss the proper tour now. It has been going pretty well, so far. We have been traveling with a very fine band of British youngsters called Let's Wrestle, who are pretty much killing it. They are real nice lads too, even if they WALK AROUND GAS STATION BATHROOMS WITHOUT ANY SHOES OR SOCKS ON! Ewwwwww! So gross! Good band, though. Here is them strutting their stuff at the Bootleg Theater the other night in Los Angeles.


That was a cool show. We actually sold all of the tickets - only the third time that has occured in the history of Titus Andronicus. Thanks, LA! Also, we got to hang out with our man Doug after the show! Shit yeah! Doug is awesome. You might remember him as the fellow who did that stirring reading from Titus Andronicus (the play) on our album, The Airing of Grievances. Yeah, all things considered, it was a pretty fun night. Here is us playing our song "Four Score and Seven" at that very same concert.


Still not convinced this show was good? Okay, fair enough. Before you really make up yr mind though, why not read this quite nice article that ran in the Los Angeles Times the following day? They wouldn't say all these nice things if they weren't true, would they? WOULD THEY?!?!?

Here's some other massive news. The other day, just outsude of Phoenix, AZ, our beloved van, Blue Thunder aka Art Vandelay aka Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj, hit the magic 200,000 mile mark. We celebrated by listening to "Blue Thunder" by Galaxie 500 and doing a van-centric madlib. It was awesome. Here's the proof:


If I had to pick one moment of this tour where I really achieved transcendence, though, it would have to be a few nights ago in El Paso, where we found ourselves playing second on a four band bill, after our pals Let's Wrestle, but before this band called Nice Nice (not named after the club from the Lifter Puller mythology, I found out), who I had never heard of before. Long story short, THEY ARE FUCKING AMAZING. As a guy who has never been shy about his lack of patience with the excessive glut of "drummer and guy with a loop pedal" bands and how they usually suck, I can safely say that this band renders all those others moot and quadruple-handedly justifies the whole genre. Also, they use their technical virtuosity for good rather than evil, which is just unheard of. I will not bother trying to describe their music, as it was wild, nor shall I plug any record by them, as they truly have to be seen to be believed. They look like this:


Man, they rock. All right, well, I have to go and meet the others at the San Luis Obispo Arts Center to prepare to attempt to rock the faces off of whatever punks happen to show up. Why are we working so hard, you ask? Well, isn't it obvious?


BALLIN'!!! Okay, talk to you kids later. Stay safe.

Yr friend,
Patrick