This album is kind of like what would have happened if Billy Joe and his fellow Green Day bandmates had not turned into mainstream pop songwriters and instead of churning out the slickly polished and completely jagged-edge-free American Idiot had chosen to do something that was both highbrow concept and punk as fuck. Titus Andronicus' The Monitor is Welcome to Paradise meets Bruce Springsteen meets The Civil War. It's pretty much awesome.

I don't know how I could keep writing about the album after that paragraph. That's all there is to it. The songwriting is awesome, the music is mostly awesome, the album is relatively devoid of low points (though there are some) and my favorite lyric is from this song: "But there's only one dream that I keep close, and it's the one of my hand at your throat."

These guys should team up with Andrew Jackson Jihad. To do what, I am not sure, but to do something awesome.