The Monitor opens with a reading from an inspirational address by Abraham Lincoln to the young men of Cleveland before exploding into the seven-minute opus,"A More Perfect Union." It's a song as stirring and moving as Sonic Youth's "Teenage Riot" and rests its distorted guitars on equal parts Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg and the Civil War-era rallying song "John Brown's Body." Titus Andronicus mix Civil War references, like the famed naval battle between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia that forms the basis of the song "The Battle of Hampton Road," with more up-to-date cultural signifiers to help capture the fervour of revolutionary times.
The end of the Civil War brought with it the cultural events of the Reconstruction, like the Great Migration and the Great Awakening, the collapse of one America and the birth of another. This second full-length album finds the band asking what kind of America lies on the other side of the Great Recession. As Titus Andronicus urges listeners to "Rally around the flag," warning that "The enemy is everywhere," the album concludes with the epic "Battle of Hampton Roads," a state of the alterna-union address that makes The Monitor sound like the drawing of a line in the sand with emo kids, punk rockers and shoegazers on the one side, and the rest of mainstream America on the other.
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