Hey guys, remember Desaparecidos? Probably not. The only people who remember Desaparecidos are likely just Bright Eyes fans who know the band through lead singer/lyricist/future folk monster Conor Oberst. Honestly, isn't that a little perverse? Congrats, Desaparecidos, you will always be known as "that band Conor Oberst was in that wasn't Bright Eyes, after he was/wasn't in The Faint, before he did solo stuff and way before Monsters of Folk." Tough break. When I was in my Saddle Creek Records phase (have I mentioned that before? I feel like I say it every third post), I actually liked Desaparecidos a bit; they were more awake and less thoughty than Bright Eyes, while still keeping Oberst's overwhelming defeatist angst that he carried so well in that part of the Aughts, before he was slightly miscast as our generation's Dylan.
Listening to them now, though, there are parts I snort at too easily; the overly-social lyrics ("opportunity, no it don't exist/It's the opiate of the populace"), Oberst's screaming that gets whiny so soon it just sounds like he's crying-fighting ("I don't think she likes me!"). But for what he and his band mates were doing, they did it well: almost-punk basement rock; which is what Punk should have turned into instead of getting sidetracked into New Wave (not that it was a mistake) or Grunge (which was a serious mistake).
The only ever released one album, Read Music/Speak Spanish, and it is–with the exception of the few disparages that I mentioned above–not that bad at all. You can almost feel Oberst's spit coming out the speakers as he mumble-screams about divorce and capitalism, the guitars are lo-fi enough to absorb but not be overwhelmed by, and the bass and drums sound more like they're coming up from the floor below instead of from iTunes. They play infomercials over their bridges, it's hardcore without being actually hardcore, and it's rock without having even a drop of douchewater. You could never imagine them being anywhere larger than a dive bar, and with good reason; this is the sort of music that stadiums ruin, the perfect argument against the wide open spaces of crap like Warped Tour.
It might be for this last reason that bands like Desaparecidos never really did make the big time, the music has been around for a long time, but it's hard to transport the songs out of the local venue and into anything else, and it's even harder to say of lo-fi rock that it's supposed to sound that way, especially when it can be done so poorly. But oh my dear reader, worry not. Because, after more or less forgetting that I wanted to listen to it, I listened to The Airing of Grievances, the first full-length by New Jersey's Titus Andronicus. And it is very, very good.
I don't really know that much about Titus Andronicus, so I won't pretend to figure out
something biographical (everything that I mentioned above that is of that ilk is only due to my aforementioned Saddle Creek phase). I will, of course, note that in my previous post, I not only mentioned the Shakespearean play that the band took its name from, but quoted from a speech that singer Patrick Stickles himself recites at the end of the album's opener, "Fear and Loathing in Mahwah, NJ", a song which also might contain my favorite possible breakup lyric of the year: "the way we hold each other so tight would look more like a noose if held up to the light/because we betray each other in dreams every night/now let's never speak of it again, all right?"Stickles' vocals are, as a matter of fact, closely interchangeable from Conor Oberst's baby-punk screams, but they seem to arise more out of desperation and a "fuck you" (or as he himself says, "fuck everything! Fuck me!") attitude instead of just straight up anger at the way things are, he sings with self-loathing and indulgence at the same time, shout-growling "there's nothing I've ever done I didn't learn to be ashamed of", and later, "I hope I never get my fill of pushing this boulder up this hill." And while we're on the subject of Sisyphus, I ought to point out that this album's got plenty for the tongue-in-cheek intellectual: not only does the band borrow from Shakespeare's tragedy, but Sickles also quotes from The Stranger, makes a semi-oblique reference to a W.H. Auden poem, and seems to be one of the few who can do Biblical referencing well. Go team.
Somehow The Airing of Grievances manages to be sincere and ironic, breakneck and thoughtful, angry and contemplative at the same time. And for once, it is a take on lo-fi production that I can get behind, like The Strokes' Is This It, only faster and less of a hipster. It seems to sound the way it does because that's just the best way to hear it; not because they couldn't afford better production, and not because they could afford better production but wanted to seem more indie. And, long story short, I want to see them live, it seems like I'd get bloody and like it, which is really not something that ever happens in my case. Where the audience at the Desaparecidos show bounced their knees and nodded to the beat, Titus Andronicus is more like when the Violent Femmes scream "When I say dance, you'd best dance, motherfucker!"
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