Titus Andronicus

Most people living the examined life spend years trying to find answers to all of existence’s big questions, eventually settling for something that rings true to them or just giving up entirely. But what if you’d read a bunch of philosophy and all the classics and had everything figured out by age 20? And you realized it wasn’t pretty? Then you might make a passionately bleak yet irresistibly rousing album like The Airing of Grievances—if you were as good as Titus Andronicus.

Named for one of Shakespeare’s earliest and bloodiest plays, the north Jersey quintet paints the world as an array of chaotic forces aligned against us—and it’s as hopeless as you can imagine. “God sent me a vision of the future in a dream / And I see no reason to celebrate,” Patrick Stickles sings on “Upon Viewing Brueghel’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,’ ” in a breathless fury that he somehow maintains for damn near the whole album. He sounds defeated but hardly depressed—ready to fight, actually, and his band backs him with relentlessly punchy bar rock delivered in casual production that screams “underdog.” The album’s best moment, on the group’s namesake track, finds Stickles & Co. chanting, “Your life is over!” while clapping merrily. Things must be grim indeed; let’s celebrate!

Titus Andronicus plays Knitting Factory Fri, Jun 27, East River Park Amphitheater Sat, Jun 28, Maxwell’s July 11 and Mercury Lounge July 13.