“Keep your feet on the ground and have a good time,” said Patrick Stickles, his furrowed brow piercing the Thursday night crowd at Brighton Music Hall. He absentmindedly strummed the opening chords of “Upon Viewing Oregon’s Landscape With the Flood of Detritus,” a song from 2012 by his band, Titus Andronicus, as he waxed poetic, as he often does, about the delicacy of human life and emotion, and how violence and moshing had no place in it, or in his band’s show in Boston. Stickles tends to embody the purest of punk ethos in his dogged dedication to art and its expression– his songs lay bare his struggle with mental illness and misanthropy with brutal candor, all wrapped in chord progressions and rousing choruses so catchy that you can’t help but jump around just a little.
After solid opening sets from Baked (featuring guitar from Stove/Ovlov’s Steve Hartlett, who was pulling double duty after opening for Krill earlier that night at Great Scott) and Spider Bags, Stickles and co. proceeded to dive into an epic two-hour set that pulled material from all four of the band’s studio albums, including their most recent release, the 29-track rock opera The Most Lamentable Tragedy. It’s tough to keep a crowd interested in any one thing for two hours straight, but Stickles’ dynamism as a performer, along with that of his bandmates (especially keyboardist and Somervillian Elio DeLuca), kept the crowd buzzing and eager for more.
Titus Andronicus is a band that lays it all on the line for every show, and their strength as a live act draws from this sense of urgency and manic energy. Brighton Music Hall, packed end-to-end with fans and bearded Stickles look-alikes, seemed to shake on its foundations as the band launched into “A More Perfect Union,” an old hit that chronicles the end of a relationship and era Stickles spent living in none other than Somerville, MA. In what seemed to be another nod to Boston, the band closed out their encore with a rousing rendition of The Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner”– which, you may remember, our own mayor Marty Walsh pushed to make the official state song of Massachusetts.
It’s pretty safe to say that no one’s feet remained on the ground for the entirety of the show, but, with a band like Titus Andronicus, that’s an inevitability. Their technical prowess, along with their raucous energy and swelling punk anthems, make for a two-hour set that, when it’s over, leaves you wondering how two hours could possibly pass so quickly, and how one band can produce such raw emotion from a few choice power chords. After leaving Brighton Music Hall last week, the only lamentable tragedy stuck in my head was that everyone at the Krill show couldn’t have been in two places at once to see Titus, too.
