A Productive Cough is an altogether accessible and forthright album that shows a new side of Titus Andronicus, but compared to the band’s previous highs, it can sometimes feel like half a masterpiece.
Titus Andronicus embody an interesting contrast. On one hand, they’re gritty as hell. Their music is best described as “raw,” and a good portion of it embraces lo-fi recording. Their debut album The Airing of Grievances particularly sounds like it was made with whatever they scrounged for at a garage sale. Their frontman Patrick Stickles has a gravelly voice and looks the part. You can practically smell the basements and dive bars when you listen to them.
On the other hand, another adjective that suits them is “grandiose.” Their fourth album The Most Lamentable Tragedy was an hour and a half long rock opera about manic depression. Their sophomore release The Monitor was loosely about the Civil War, opening with a speech by Abraham Lincoln and interspersed with other period recordings throughout. Even The Airing of Grievances contained readings from Camus’s “The Stranger” and their Shakespearean namesake.
Prior to its release, Titus Andronicus’s fifth album A Productive Cough seemed like it would fit within this odd marriage of theatrical yet grungy punk rock. The title evokes a pretty gross image, one you might expect from a singer who has referenced his smoking habit multiple times. Its first single “Number One (In New York)” stretches past the eight-minute mark, something they have done with other songs over a half dozen times before. This lengthy track contains both Stickles singing in a garbled tone that makes Tom Waits seem lucid, and a plethora of bandmates gradually joining him to offer a choir of backup vocals, clarinet, and even sleigh bells. It sounds vaguely like Titus Andronicus’s take on a song for a benefit concert, and definitely showed off the band’s knack for maximalist productions.
A Productive Cough instead turned out to be the biggest curveball yet in Titus Andronicus’s discography. For a band whose website’s tagline is “specializing in punk solutions since 2005,” A Productive Cough sounds more like it raided your parent’s record collection, as it veers heavily into blues, Americana, and a more classic rock and roll sound.
Granted, Titus Andronicus have never shunned these styles entirely, but a whole album devoid of “punk bangers” is uncharted territory for the band. Once you get over the initial shock that “Number One (In New York)” is not a one-off slow burner, A Productive Cough is fairly entertaining in its unexpectedness. For instance, the album’s second single “Above the Bodega (Local Business)” echoes Exile on Main St. era Rolling Stones with its “sha-la-la’s” and chorus backing vocals straight from “Tumbling Dice.” “Real Talk” is a singalong gospel-style song that brings Bob Dylan and the Band to mind. And speaking of Dylan, who would have expected Titus Andronicus would cover his arguably famous track “Like A Rolling Stone” on this album? Granted, this version is sung from the first-person perspective (the track title is “(I’m) Like a Rolling Stone)” and the band covered the Pogues’s “A Pair of Brown Eyes” on The Most Lamentable Tragedy, but a highly unconventional rock band giving their take on a song covered dozens of times is potentially the most surprising part of A Productive Cough.
With all the showiness on A Productive Cough, you might assume its lyrics would once again be full of Civil War metaphors or allusions to classical literature. Instead, they’re Titus Andronicus at their most succinct, as Stickles explains with the lyric “I can’t begin to think of what I’d tell people back home, so I tell it to the microphone” on “Number One (In New York).” Sometimes the album gets autobiographical, as “Above the Bodega (Local Business)” shares how a bodega clerk knows Stickles better than anyone based on his buying habits, and “Crass Tattoo” is of all things about Stickles’s decision to get a tattoo of the anarchist punk band Crass’s logo. Other times, the album alludes to the current political climate, and you don’t have to think too hard who “if this is the shit that we’re to be dealing with, then we made a real bad deal” refers to on “Real Talk.” There’s even touches of the band’s humor on the album, as their cover of “Like A Rolling Stone” distinguishes itself from other versions by ending with a recitation of the Rolling Stones lineup.
Ironically, the least gripping moments on A Productive Cough are those that feel the most familiar. “Home Alone” is the closest the band gets to their punk roots on the album, but its guitar solos can’t make up for repetitive vocals that drag on for over eight minutes. “Crass Tattoo” may literally be about Stickles’s tattoo, but he handed over vocal duties on the track to guest singer Megg Farrell, who gives a soulful performance over gentle piano notes. It’s a fine track on its own, but Titus Andronicus’s previous softer moments have built to thrilling conclusions, while this piano ballad mostly functions as a mid-album interlude. By the time the album closes with “Mass Transit Madness (Goin’ Loco’),” it’s easy enough to mistake it as a reprise of “Number One (In New York).”
While it’s neither a rock opera nor a concept album, A Productive Cough certainly has a unifying theme, and isn’t as aimless as 2012’s Local Business. Its pivot towards sounds from decades past proves the band have some unexpected strengths, and I truthfully lack the encyclopedic knowledge of classic rock to list all of its potential influences. However, its complete abandonment of heavy riffs and frantic drumming for the first time is sure to leave some disappointed, and listeners may feel shortchanged as the band forfeits their punk stylings to double-down on extravagance. The fact that the album only has seven tracks also makes its weaker moments more noticeable, whereas you may have forgotten that two of the 29 tracks on The Most Lamentable Tragedy literally consisted of silence. A Productive Cough is an altogether accessible and forthright album that shows a new side of Titus Andronicus, but compared to the band’s previous highs, it can sometimes feel like half a masterpiece.
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