In Hear This, A.V. Club writers sing the praises of songs they know well. This week, we’re talking about shows we’ve seen where the opener eclipsed the headliner.
Titus Andronicus, “Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ” (2008)
In my previous life as a wannabe rock critic, I tried to make my presence in a concert crowd as inconspicuous as possible. I was reviewing shows in Austin, Texas, so any number of musicians could’ve been standing over my shoulder as I took notes about their onstage counterparts. And if someone in the crowd wasn’t a musician, odds were just as good that they were another critic/reviewer/blogger. It was the late ’00s: Everybody had a blog.
But when I saw Los Campesinos and Titus Andronicus on a double bill in January of 2009, I had to introduce myself to the opening act’s frontman. For starters, Patrick Stickles was the guy manning the Titus Andronicus merch table, and I needed to fact-check the title of his set’s second-to-last song, a sloppy epic that kicked into motion after the rest of the band hollered “Fuck you!” at Stickles. But I also needed to hear that song, “Fear And Loathing In Mahwah, NJ,” on the ride home. And the next morning. And every morning after that for two months, until I no longer had any memory of what or how the headliners fared—only the glimmer of inquiring about that song, registering the Hunter S. Thompson-jacking portion of its title, and paying for a CD copy of The Airing Of Grievances.
That’s not how the evening was supposed to go. I was there for Los Campesinos, which, for a period that was as brief, energetic, and as full of brash declarations as one of the band’s songs, was my favorite (active) musical group in the world. It helped that the U.K.-based seven-piece covered and frequently name-checked what was then my favorite non-active band, Pavement; it also helped that Los Campesinos had seven goddamn members, as the band’s rise to underground prominence coincided with a time in my life when all I wanted to hear was really big bands making really big sounds. I was smitten with the self-aware, pop-obsessive POV of 2007’s Sticking Fingers Into Sockets EP, and preemptively declared Hold On Now, Youngster my favorite record of 2008 after seeing the band preview it at SXSW. (The record lived up to that teaser, and I still give it a listen a couple times a year.) Seven months later, after accepting the Austin assistant city editor position at what we were then calling Decider, I eagerly snatched the promo copy of the band’s second 2008 release, We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, from the office CD rack. Austin city editor Sean O’Neal had no objections.