Who wants to hear Tal Rosenberg’s Mr Burns impression?…

[Video][Website]
[6.27]

Tal Rosenberg: If it takes you seven minutes to let us know that, hey, you really mean it, man, then you’re doing something wrong.
[4]

Spencer Ackerman: Punk rock by William Lloyd Garrison! Titus Andronicus is everything I want from music right now: gravel-voiced melodies for days and days; passion and message; mid-tempo folk-inflected abrasion. Like my boys the Gaslight Anthem, they’re New Jerseyans, which means the anthems of Springsteen are in their reptilian brains. At a church basement in DC recently, they proved what this adds up to: beaming from the stage, praising the city as “the birthplace of punk ethics” and getting a packed, sweaty hall of inspired kids to chant, croon and sing along. Greater than the sum of its parts; truly a more perfect union.
[10]

Chuck Eddy: Starts out like the Hold Steady if they really really meant it (which they seem to less than ever on their new album), and if they got some Dropkick Murphys bully-boy to croak out all the regional references (about Jersey in this case, but could just as well be Upper Midwest — still, the Fung Wah Bus to Fenway and the Newark Bears, wow. Well, okay, Jesus H Christ & The Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse already did a Fung Wah song two years ago, but minor league baseball is always a thumbs-up). The singer is kind of hard to take, and I’d be very surprised if his bark and their bullshit don’t wear me down across an entire album (I’ll get around to it eventually), but I like a lot of the musical melodrama he’s surrounded with — even some Murphys-type Celtic jigging around the four-minute mark, by which time this has already begun to meander and turn sing-songy and lose its footing. Not sure what the weedy history-book monologues framing it are supposed to add, either. So I’m tempted to give it just 7 points for seven minutes, and hope somebody does a good 45 edit. But I respect its audaciousness, and detailed verbosity over loud rock repetitions definitely still has its charms.
[8]

Matt Cibula: Love this band so much that I’m willing to overlook the fact that the single edit chops all the logic out of the song. All the bravura that rock music used to provide, except reconfigured for our modern confused age; also, better one-liners than Ludacris.
[9]

Martin Skidmore: What if Jim Steinman had wanted to arrange music inspired by the Pogues, Clash, Springsteen? We might get something ambitious like this, though it doesn’t really have his epic power or polish. It kind of impresses anyway, and there is some real energy, though I can’t work up any interest in its American Civil War subject matter and its frequent quotations.
[6]

Alex Ostroff: Excerpts from Civil War oratory, brain-melting guitar lines and Celtic jigs coalesce into something heavenly on “A More Perfect Union”. The vocals are a gruff bark bellowing over a guitar and drums that are perpetually just shy of careening out of control. I don’t hail from New Jersey, but I certainly do understand the mix of love, pride and hatred one can have for one’s hometown, and Stickles & co. do joyous bitterness as well as The Hold Steady did at their height.
[8]

Ian Mathers: It’s not a criticism if I say that I can hear, in turn, Craig Finn, Paul Westerburg, Tom Gabel, and early/psychotic Conor Oberst in Patrick Stickles’ voice. The band sticks to their own brand of garage-y rumble throughout, but Stickles seems to be getting awfully adept at inserting himself into a proud, rich tradition of American songwriters who are so fucked-over and angry that they’re cracking up. “A More Perfect Union” is too disjointed for me, and I might care more about this particular choice of subject matter if I was American (I wonder how the UK contingent will feel about it?), but perversely enough it makes me like the band a lot despite not being that excited about the song.
[6]

Alex Macpherson: Goddamn, but the faux-desperation in this dude’s voice sounds so fucking empty after reviewing Courtney Love. It doesn’t help that the music is such lazy, sub-Arcade Fire bluster; it affects forward motion, but only goes round in circles, and its attempt at drive merely ends up drivel.
[3]

Alfred Soto: I don’t know why this turns anthemic in its last thirty seconds other than because it has to, and these guys probably don’t know either. Nor do they come up with a tune rousing enough to abjure the tape recorded advice played over the coda. After all, what’s wrong with equivocating? Plenty of bands have managed to write rousing and confused without besmirching their ideals. A couple of spins and I start to think “equivocate” means “muddle,” and “born to die” shouted with all the angst at youth’s disposal means “born to run” was already copyrighted.
[5]

John Seroff: An intro reminiscent of Orbital’s “Forever”, then a too-long mishmash of sound and fury signifying surprisingly little. There’s enough hook and style jacking to raise the outside possibility that this is a parody, but I imagine it’s much more likely I’m just missing the point, whatever that may be.
[3]

Edward Okulicz: The fierce but chiming guitars and rousing chorus of “yeah” seduce me even as the vocals of the singer repulse me, and the combined effect is awkward but not pleasureless. Even if the voice is unpleasant, it has conviction that makes the nebulous history/histrionics come across as substantial and interesting rather than indulgent. The video edit shaves off the most tuneless parts of the seven-minute album version and everyone’s happier that way. And in contrast to its neighbour, I will never get tired of songs about New Jersey.
[7]