RATING: 8/10
How do you follow an album like The Monitor? It's an album adored by many people (me included), one of the best of the last decade. It sums up the ethos and attitude of Titus Andronicus so competely that it will always be regarded as their calling card.
The first point to make is that Local Business is not The Monitor. Nor is it simply The Monitor: Part Two. To try to top it would be foolish, so Titus Andronicus have shifted their sound to a different plane. The entire album feels less ramshackle. The songs are reined in, the band itself thinned down and refined to a core of five. Singer Patrick Stickles sounds less like he is hauling notes out of his throat from the pit his stomache, and the pace throughout is slower, like an album comprised of the first half of 'Theme From Cheers.' Overall, Titus Andronicus continue to draw from their punk rock background - when I considered this at first, I wanted to draw a comparison to The Clash recording London Calling, embracing a world of different influences as the confines of punk music dawned on them. But, despite adopting a style more suited to classic rock (there's even a hint of country rock at the start of '(I Am The) Electric Man') Titus still stay true to their roots. After all, they expanded a love of punk into a concept album about the American Civil War as a metaphor for a coming of age journey to New Jersey. The boundaries of genre perhaps do not matter here.
Punk or no punk, Stickles' lyrics continue the trend found in both The Monitor and their debut The Airing of Grievances. Albert Camus continues to linger a heavy influence ('Titus Andronicus Vs. The Absurd Universe (3rd Round KO)' being a good example, with it's sole lyric of 'I am going insane'). The opening gambit of Local Business is:
Okay, I think, by now, we've established that everything is inherantly worthless
And there is nothing in the universe with any kind of objective purpose
Later in the same song:
I heard about my authentic self - what would I say were I ever to meet him?
I guess "Yr guilty of a terrible crime, and I know it was my birth"
I'm doing twenty-six to life now on planet Earth
An obsession with Camus' Absurd prevails, but the most powerful section of the album is when Stickles addresses his eating disorder on the self-explanitory 'My Eating Disorder', (preceded by the ironic 'Food Fight!'). Detailing the 'amorphous monster' that prevents him from consuming food, he moves between the artifical medication of vitamin pills and the self-medication of cigarettes.
Again, like their previous two albums the lyrics are strong, with regular moments of genius.
Your gonna get your chance to be hung
You'll make a great gift to gracious girls
Try to swallow while your still young
That your dick's too short to fuck the world
is an early personal favourite. The only problem is that some the lyrics begin to seem lazy. Both 'Titus Andronicus Vs The Absurd Universe' and 'Food Fight!' are limited to one line each, while the album closer 'Tried To Quit Smoking' has good lines, but makes the mistake of stretching them over ten minutes which begin to drag half way through. The astonishing 'The Battle of Hampton Roads' which closes The Monitor, by comparison, runs for fourteen minutes and flies by, by virtue of cramming in as many ideas as you could find in entire albums by other bands.
And there, the main problem with Local Business raises it's head again - the spectre of The Monitor, in escapable. Simply, Local Business is on no level as good as it's predesessor. We never should have expected it to be. The trouble is not with the album, but with the expectations. As a stand-alone album, Local Business is great - as part of the wider Titus Andronicus canon, not so much.
In an interview to promote The Monitor, Patrick Stickles remarked that the Civil War battleship from which the album took his name from hung over his thoughts, and his experience with New Jersey, that The Monitor, as impressive as it was, began to cloud everything. How right he was.
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