The Most Lamentable Tragedy,Titus Andronicus, Merge
An image comes to mind from the sound of Patrick Stickles’ slurring, ranting, barking voice throughout The Most Lamentable Tragedy, the new 29-track, five-act, double-disc, energizing and exhausting punk opera by Titus Andronicus. It’s someone bailing out a boat with a hole in it, adrenalized, alarmed, but in tune with the rhythm of the work and the line between floating and sinking. He’s having an emergency, and emergency is his native state. This is the band’s second concept record, after The Monitor, from 2010, which used the Civil War in various metaphorical ways. As Stickles has explained through interviews, and annotations of his own songs at genius.com, Lamentable is a doppelganger story — or maybe a spirit-possession story — as a metaphor for manic depression. An alien force takes over the central character: “He don’t act like me, but we look alike,” he sings toward the end of Act 1.
The song cycle is also a metaphor for the tidal nature of depression, and its five acts move through stages of hope and despair. (Stickles loves clever, attention-rewarding details and devices: The album refers back to some of the band’s older songs even as it builds its own narrative circle.) Its hero opens his eyes in the beginning, remarking, “I hate to be awake.” In the middle he thinks about sex and family and religion, drugs and love and doctors and the government. Toward the end he returns to bed, asking, “You’re at peace when you sleep/why not an endless dream?”
When the band’s not playing tight punk with clean lines, or semi-Irish singalongs, it evokes mainstream, working-class radio rock from the ‘70s, Bruce Springsteen being the major example. It’s a strategy as counterintuitive as the basic idea of the punk opera: exterior music for interior words, spirited sounds for spiritless feelings. This is an album in which one song (Lonely Boy) uses a common, upbeat, chugging rock riff in the service of lyrics describing a state of mind so bleak that going outside becomes impossible. String arrangements ennoble and expand the emotions in some songs; they can also make the music stodgier and bring on listener fatigue.
Depending on which act you’re in, the central character grows lofty or stays close to the ground, at animal level. Some of the best songs are about the most instinctive behavior: “(S)he Said/(S)he Said” begins with the line “I need to eat something today,” before moving on to other specific and increasingly desperate needs. Dimed Out deals with cravings on a grand scale and the euphoria that can result from them. The title refers to turning amplifier levels to 10; the lyrics boast that “when my chalice is full/I am invincible.” The high, both in the storyline and in the course of the album, is temporary. But it’s one of several vertiginous peaks on a pretty vertiginous record.
— BEN RATLIFF, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
At Least for Now, Benjamin Clementine, Behind/Capitol
Benjamin Clementine sings the chorus of London — one of the better songs on his debut album, At Least for Now — as if struck by a painful flash of insight. “London, London, London is caaaaalling you,” he urges, opening the throttle on his voice. “What are you waiting for, what are you searching for?” He goes on this way awhile, then lands on a quieter note of a resolve: “I won’t underestimate who I am capable of becoming.”
Clementine, a Parisian bohemian of London origin, is dead serious about that vow. At Least for Now is his declaration of selfhood, an album very much about the act of becoming, with a tightrope balance of dramatic artifice and diaristic detail. “I’m sending my condolences to insecurities,” Clementine sings on Condolence, a bittersweet anthem in which he also reflects on his own birth, declaring: “So when I become someone one day/I will always remember that I came from nothing.”
A singer-songwriter and pianist with a knack for expressionist outpouring, Clementine, 26, has a striking backstory — as a self-taught musician and poet, a busker on the Paris metro, a rambler on the streets. The acclaim that has greeted him in Europe, where At Least for Now was released this spring, surely has something to do with his persona. There’s no way it couldn’t, given how deftly his songs build on it, even as the arrangements involve a chamber string section, and his narrative voice toggles between first, second and third person.
As for Clementine’s actual voice, it’s a strange and frequently stunning instrument, a bladelike tenor that can swoop into either a clarion cry or a guttural scowl. The inevitable comparison, notably on a song like Adios, is to Nina Simone — to her demonstrative clarity of phrase, and the flickering incandescence of her timbre. There are other clear influences, some of whom Clementine acknowledges in album notes: Antony Hegarty, Leonard Cohen. Satie, Puccini, Pavarotti. The poet William Blake.
Despite this rich awareness of artistic precedent, Clementine holds fast in his songs to an experience of alienation that’s exceptional, unique unto himself. However callow his thinking, it does make for good material. In Cornerstone, another standout track on the album, he sings of being “alone in a box of my own,” and learning to savor such conditions: “It’s my home.”
— NATE CHINEN, NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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