For a start, their name is taken from one of Shakespeare's lesser-known plays, a bloody tragedy in which revenge and ego are entangled. It's an apt moniker given the violent, almost nihilistic, music the five-piece create; all hammered drums and shredded guitar lines.

It's a sound at once out of step with current styles - no cheap synths, no Afro-beat pretensions - but simultaneously timeless, recalling an American musical lineage from Bruce Springsteen to Nirvana to Bright Eyes to Arcade Fire.

There's no getting away from the vocal similarities between lead singer Patrick Stickles and Conor Oberst, particularly the Conor Oberst of Desaparecidos. They both share that pained, lubricated by liquor quavering bellow that seems to scream anger and hysteria as one.

The main difference, however, is that Titus Andronicus sound not just annoyed but interminably frustrated, like only the best bands from dead-end towns can. The stark production captures a rawness that suits the songs, most notably on opener, Fear and Loathing In Mahwah, NJ, a song that builds from a hushed opening to a barnstorming, bar-brawling finish complete with Pogues-esque violin competing with a twisted guitar solo that eventually collapses to leave a soliloquy from the Titus Andronicus character.

It's an audacious, frenetic start, and from there the album barely lets up. The band have stated their dislike for 'slow songs' and keep true to their word, My Time Outside The Womb and Joset of Nazareth's Blues, rushing past in a blur of slurred words and alcohol-stained hopes.

The five minute long Arms Against Atrophy is another highlight. A deceptively simple riff kicks things off in typically frantic fashion, Stickles voice trying to keep up with the momentum of the band before the song ramps up a gear and a ridiculously catchy guitar riff appears from nowhere.

When they eventually do slow things down they manage to keep the drama quota just as high. No Future, Pt 1 is over seven minutes of unrestrained nihilism, a loping, crumpled, almost rusty sounding paean to lost hope that ironically ends with the line "Good times are here again". Stickles sounds about as happy as you imagine he would be if he learnt George Bush was staying on for another four years.

The album ends with a guitar cacophony named after the French philosopher and writer most noted for his ideas on the Absurd, Albert Camus. Camus worked on the theory that everything has its opposite and that happiness is fleeting, whilst his aim was not to revel in the morbid but to show that you needed to appreciate life while you could.

This sense of being aware of our own impending death leading to a heightened sense of life sums up perfectly The Airing of Grievances, an album that bemoans the past, shrugs it's shoulders and raises a glass to the future.

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Mercury Prize 2009 nominees