Titus Andronicus Bleed Bipolar on Ambitious New Double Album
Patrick Stickles and his bandmates. Stickles is the bipolar mastermind behind Titus Andronicus.
It isn’t emo. It isn’t screamo. But it’s definitely emotional. New Jersey punks Titus Andronicus just dropped an atomic bomb of a double album, The Most Lamentable Tragedy, a 29-song, 93-minute blood-and-guts opus about frontman Patrick Stickles’ struggles with bipolar disorder.
Tragedy is a grandiose punk-rock opera filled with power chords and sky-high hysteric lyrics. Think of it as an epic poem for the rock-‘n’-roll set.
The album is divided into five acts and takes place over four seasons. Winter is depression. Spring is hypomania. And summer is mania. The central character emerges at the start of the album in a deep depression.
A dissonant 12-note keyboard chord kicks off the album with the instrumental “Angry Hour,” before launching into a deluge of distortion and the following lyrics:
Some days start with an earthquake
The bed shakes until it breaks
And I hate to be awake
Most days start with a dull ache
Enough weight to crush my face
And I hate to be awake
…
So I just lie and count the chains
Assign them a thousand names
To praise their astounding strength
My portrait, proud and vain
Hanging without a frame
On the wall of the house of pain
— “No Future Part IV: No Future Triumphant”
The song is an eloquent, authentic description of depression.
Tragedy tackles meds and mental institutions (“A plate full of pills, I swallowed them dry . I was displayed in a cage, they claimed, in the name of science.” (“I Lost My Mind ( +@ )”), wanting to be left alone (“Lonely Boy”), illicit drugs and how they can help or hurt (“Dimed Out”), and depression (in Stickles’ parlance “going down the mine,” “Into the Void”).
Stickles didn’t use a computer to write these lyrics. Instead, he wrote them out by hand because he wanted them to be harder to edit and therefore more genuine. The frontman went into a deep depression just before the band was ready to record. He calls the album not autobiographical but an “allegory.”
“All the experiences that happened to the main character have pretty much happened to me,” he told Consequence of Sound.
Minus the British accent, Stickles sings like Joe Strummer from the Clash circa 1977 — guttural and unfiltered.
I lost my head for a while
I was off my rocker outta line, outta whack
See I had this tiny crack in my head
That slowly split open and my brains oozed out
— “I Lost My Mind ( DJ )”
Tragedy is bleak and beautiful — an introspective, neurotic rampage that ebbs and flows with mania and depression. Sometimes erratic, other times harmonious, but definitely pervasive with bitter honesty. An instant classic for those of us who live with bipolar disorder.
Here’s the epic video for “The Magic Morning” — featuring several songs off the album.
And more lyrics samples…
