Last month a few of my college friends and I were talking about music via twitter. The discussion eventually descended into nostalgia over a particular moment when we all sat in a room, listened to a record uninterrupted and then talked about it immediately after: the album listening party. The album listening parties were hosted by our adviser, whom we referred to then as, Dr. J (and some still do.) Over that semester we had about 6 or so listening parties and it was awesome.

During the discussion while everyone was crying tears of sorrow over how those times are dead and gone, I thought “what’s stopping us from doing this now?” I had an epiphany: an album listening party via the internet. We’d all listen to the record at the same time, “talk” about it via skype’s instant messaging service, then actually discuss the record using its conference call feature. Behold! #listeningkids was born.

After creating a Google Group, and setting a date, we were rolling. Two listening parties ago, one of the #listeningkids presented Titus Andronicus most recent album “The Monitor.” I had discovered Titus about a year and a half ago via a “song-of-the-day” podcast and was immediately drawn to their lo-fi, Bruce Springsteen meets the Sex Pistols punk/rock sound. It didn’t hurt that when I first heard the repeated chorus lyric “Your life is over” I was working a job I hated in a town I hated even more. The song was from their first studio album “The Airing of Grievances,” and I was very excited to hear Titus’s newest album “The Monitor.”

“The Monitor” opens with a bombshell. It begins with a prophetic quote from Abraham Lincoln before he was president, before the war started: “There is no foreign power that can destroy us quite like our self.” This theme is hammered over and over throughout the record’s 10 tracks. Like what Tim Kasher did tongue-in-cheekily in Cursive’s monolith “The Ugly Organ,” Titus Andronicus’s singer and lyricist Patrick Stickles embraces the contradiction of self-flagellation as masturbation. The very act of confessing ones short-comings, failures and suffering is excruciatingly painful but we get off on it; both listener and confessor. The problem cuts to the quick. How do artists still create art with the knowledge that that is exactly what they are trying to do? How does they overcome the self-inflicted pressure? They must overcome! both for the listener and themselves. Stickles and the rest of the Andronites attempt this by wrestling with and embracing their dirt-bag roots like the Boss himself and the rest of the Garden State are watching. Because they are, and so are we, and the album is a masterpiece because of it.

The five individuals that comprise Titus Andronicus are from New Jersey, and like the rest of the state, they love Bruce Springsteen and wear that on their sleeve. It is this love of Asbury Park’s greatest that shines the brightest in their music despite reflections of the Dropkick Murphy’s and Cursive. Each and every track on “The Monitor” is epic and fused with teenage joy and that joy is probably the most apt self-criticism on the whole record. As Patrick Stickles lyrically rips himself apart on each song highlighting how fake he is by constantly making pop culture references instead of real conversation, using alcohol to forget about his problems and numb his emotions, constantly calling himself some version of “fuck-up” and “quitter;” the band plays energetic, powerful and nearly bouncy Boss-inspired punk jams. Stickles fights against who he was and where he came from and how he thought fleeing with a particular girl to a particular city could save him from Jersey, the “town full of losers” and how that thought profoundly shapes who he is now and who he wants to be. But the music, the music!, disagrees with Stickles assessment of himself and his fate and speaks the words of the prophet: “there’s no place left to hide.”

An alternate title for “The Monitor” could have been “Born to Run (and then Retreat)” but I would argue that it could also be titled “Chimes of Freedom.” Of all the allusions to the civil war throughout the record: schism, the inner struggle, an entity ripping itself apart by it’s own volition; despite the tragedy, loss and ruin brought about by the conflict the fact is the slaves were still freed. Freedom rings like ears after a cannon firing in every IV-V-I and is present in Stickles’ caterwaul even at his most depraved.

This is rock ‘n’ roll! This is an album! Start to finish each note perfectly placed by design. Each song following the one before and not as powerful taken out of its full and proper context. Each lyric functioning on multiple levels: a collision of cultural contexts, symbolism, allusion and the marriage of the personal and the universal. Titus Andronicus have created a master-work and it is a damn shame more records like this are not released. Even after our listening party several members of the group commented on how they liked “The Monitor” and thought it was pretty good but “probably won’t ever listen to it again.” This is a tragedy! Are you listening? I mean, are you really listening? “The Monitor” is a massive record, impossible to digest in one sitting. New layers of meaning unfold with each listen. It must be paid attention to! It must be appreciated because records like this are not released often and they deserve more time than casual, background music listeners normally give. This record deserves to be studied, mediated over, and championed.

Larger works have the amazing ability to change our life but only when we slow down enough to really hear what it is being said. I do not know where I would be without albums like:

Breach Kollapse
Fucked Up The Chemistry of Common Life
Cursive The Ugly Organ
Bjork Medulla
Modern Life is War Witness
Wilco Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Converge Jane Doe
Deftones White Pony
Brand New The God and Devil Are Raging Inside Me

And so many others. “The Monitor” is topping my year end list so far for best album of 2010 and I hope it makes it onto many, many, many other top tens as well. That is, if more are willing to really listen.