A Productive Cough, Titus Andronicus’ fifth full-length, is unambitious by the New Jersey band’s standards. It’s not 92 and a half minutes, a five-part rock opera, or a Civil War concept album, complete with an interlude of Craig Finn reading Walt Whitman. Even so, it manages nearly seven minutes a song, features the word “rigamarole” [sic], grandiloquent lyrics and includes a first-person rendering of “Like a Rolling Stone.” If that still sounds self-serious, well, this is a Titus Andronicus album. The proceedings would be a lot less palatable if they didn’t often achieve a forceful, unhinged immediacy; amid the heavy themes and brash posturing, there’s still room for the band to elbow in some loud, rousing real life shit, man.
On the opener, “Number One (In New York),” front man Patrick Stickles does a ramshackle Axl Rose, channeling his litany-happy lyricism into a montage state of the union and stretching his raw vocals over a minimalist piano melody, eventually joined by throbbing guitar and leaden drums. The combination of growling vocals decrying a decaying world and sweeping instrumentation is reminiscent of Ellery James Roberts’ terrific 2013 single, “Kerou’s Lament.” But whereas that song trafficked in Me vs. The World vagaries, “Number One…” invokes the familiar argot of modern American political strife: “Deplorable forces conspire…to hire a guy who will try to eat more of the portions…Hopeless hapless masses are dopes, they suppose.” With a quiet conscience “ensconced in the tarpit,” Stickles plays a man with a lot on his mind and not much to do about it. This conundrum of paralyzing personal anxiety in times that call for great collective action is confusing to address individually, much less make an album about. As a result, A Productive Cough, in its uneven, compelling tumble — like 2012’s hit-or-miss Local Business — plays like a band stretching and rolling their shoulders, sounding a chorus of internal cracks and pops, seeking the comfortable, cohesive position they held on their focused conceptual opus, 2010’s The Monitor.
While they both lack The Monitor’s amibitions, A Productive Cough has more heft than Local Business, especially in its often bellowing socio-political renunciations and muscular, country-inflected sound. While “fun” isn’t exactly the Titus Andronicus modus on record, the album is a satisfying if rough-hewn romp, shifting their music from urban post-punk sprawl to the kind of thumping usually heard behind chicken-wire at a backroads dive bar in a movie. Halfway through, things swing from raucous to tender, pausing Stickles’ hoarse diatribes with the barren, delicately-strummed “Crass Tattoo.” The song is a droning ode to quiet defiance, featuring a languid vocal spot from Brooklyn-based folkie Megg Farrell. Perhaps surprisingly, this quieter moment delivers the album’s raison d’etre most effectively: “To dismantle authority and nullify all laws / and construct in their vacancy a kinder, juster world / One human race beneath the black flag unfurled.”
Even when these songs don’t explicitly call for a rally ‘round the flag, they seem to be stirring something up, or at least to be trying. Such is the case on the album’s highlight, “Real Talk,” a rollicking sing-along chronicle of a world rumbling towards the precipice. With Stickles and his hearty cohort buoyed by hype man Matt “Money” Miller’s ecstatic ad-libs, the song thrusts in with percussive grunts and punchy drums over wandering, triumphant horns, and provides the most authentic moments of grooving catharsis. Granted, even with seven minutes and fifteen seconds, global upheaval is a big topic, but one would be hard pressed to find a more honest summation than “if the future’s as bleak as I hear on the street, we’re looking at a real long haul.” For what it’s worth, he doesn’t sound mad about it.
With the inciting fury and revelatory aspirations of a punk rock tent revival, Titus Andronicus have always peddled a brand of evangelism that’s less about rebirth than outraged observation, reporting from the thick of a pulsing personal and societal chaos. There’s a stirring derangement to their music, though it often seems to diminish under the weight of a nagging self-righteousness. At best, however, that domineering bent aligns with their fundamental ability to play a wide range of kick-ass rock ‘n’ roll. More often than not, that’s the case on A Productive Cough. In more than name, this album is a throat-clearing for Titus Andronicus; the band’s haggard but salient foray into a thoroughly concerning new world.