Titus Andronicus - A Productive Cough

Drowned In Sound 80

Frontman Patrick Stickles goes beyond the point of mere confession in regards to his mental issues - he indulges them at every turn, commonly making spectacles out of them. A Productive Cough reads like one severe panic attack set to music. Unlike a lot of bands, where the backing musicians either intentionally or unintentionally act as mere vessels for the ideology of the frontman, all the players of Titus Andronicus let their personalities shine through. But in keeping with their theatrical aspirations, a slew of other musicians were brought in to collaborate on A Productive Cough, including esteemed cellist Jane Scarpantoni (Lou Reed, R.E.M.) and pianist Rick Steph (Hank Williams Jr., Catpower).

A Productive Cough by Titus Andronicus

Steph’s syrupy piano guides 'Number One (In New York)', as Stickles gradually builds to a voice of abrasion. But interwoven in the breathless wailing is a poetic indictment of postmodern pandemonium, almost like a tempered, modern take on The Clash’s 'Lost in the Supermarket' with a Bowie-esque eye for detaill. Stickles is perennially uncomfortable in an invasive world, and his vague longings to define himself are all but ineffectual.

Past Titus Adronicus releases have married their punk roots with their more traditional rock leanings, but amid the lyrical neurosis, A Productive Cough sounds like clever homage at times. On 'Real Talk' there is an amalgam of soul and country-honk blues, similar in scope to the Rolling Stones circa their Let it Bleed through Exile on Mainstreet period. The musicianship helps to personify this 19th nervous breakdown feeling while the lyrics smack of a dystopian view of the present. But in spite of the hysteria, Stickles seems to be toasting to the hopelessness of it all, as if he is comfortably numb in his awareness of his own inadequacy.

What’s interesting about A Productive Cough is how accessible it is compared with the band’s past work. 'Above the Bodega (Local Business)' is one of the most palatable songs in their entire library in both tone and sonic reach. Literally commenting on the utter transparency of our times, where privacy is mainly a bygone luxury, Stickles and company are also harbouring a transparent sound. As he struggles to convey an image of perfection to the world, the local convenience store clerk knows all of his true vices. There is simultaneously a degree of frustration and tranquil resignation in his voice.

All of the songs have an intended vastness about them, like modern mini anthems in their own right. Megg Farrell sings vocals on the lush 'A Crass Tattoo', once again echoing that contemporary feeling of being engulfed in a culture war. Stickles then provides a raucous cover of Bob Dylan’s 'Like A Rolling Stone', where he looks inward and addresses the song to himself in a terse monologue. Even though it is one of the best renditions of the song to date, nestled between the rest of the album’s odes to modern angst, it is a bit on the nose for a band that likes to revel in audacious undertakings.

'Home Alone' and 'Mass Transit Madness (Goin’ Loco)' are both fitting conclusions to a thematically dense and deeply gratifying album. Sparse on the witty poetics he usually employs, 'Home Alone' has an ominous feel - Stickles seems to be concurrently celebrating and wallowing in his loneliness. Through all of the bleak scenarios littered throughout A Productive Cough, Stickles is adamant that life will ultimately reward those who persevere: As he sings on the last track of the album, “making my days go away one by one ain't my idea of fun/ But I take as it comes/ And the scrape of the trains breaking wakes up the sun.”

Pitchfork 59

Led by the indomitable Patrick Stickles, the band’s fifth album shifts towards a more stripped down, barroom rock feel. But for all its musical freedom, A Productive Cough is still a laborious record.

The Guardian 40

(Merge)

Ten years after their debut, Airing of Grievances, New Jersey punks Titus Andronicus finally seem to have got it all off their chests, their ragged, runaway energy softened into a soused sentimentality. Like 2015’s epic, dark The Most Lamentable Tragedy, their fifth album stretches beyond their origins, but in a more upbeat direction: Real Talk adorns its rambunctious, soulful country-punk with sax, snatches of rap and a hokey, rootsy chorus straight out of Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions, while Brooklyn singer Megg Farrell provides nobly weary vocals on the bar-room piano and folksy-fiddle lament, Crass Tattoo. The band sound stronger on the heavier, more familiar ground of Home Alone, which revels in low, brooding riffs, grungy snarls from frontman Patrick Stickles and swaggering 70s hard-rock tendencies.

The weakest moment is the raddled semi-cover (I’m) Like a Rolling Stone, a viewpoint-swap of Dylan’s 60s monolith, in which the conceit wears thin by the end of the first verse; perhaps a female singer could cut to the heart of the song’s strange, sexualised schadenfreude, but it’s hard to see the point here. As a whole, A Productive Cough seems as underdeveloped as its back-of-a-medicine-bottle title: there are great moments, but four songs top the seven-minute mark without enough to justify it.And the amiable, piano-tinkled rock’n’soul of Above the Bodega (Local Business) hammers home its core lyrical idea – that Stickles can’t keep a secret from the man at the store downstairs – so many times that by the end you’ll be fervently wishing he’d kept the fact secret from you.