Patrick Stickles understands that it takes a gimmick to sell music these days, so he’s winkingly provided one. To tease their throat-grabbing new album An Obelisk, the band released a meta, 36-minute pilot for a sitcom called “STACKS” that satirizes the modern promotional cycle while simultaneously feeding it, following a barely fictionalized version of Stickles as he endures the indignities of the record industry. After the album’s first video flops, his label PR suggests manufacturing a viral dance challenge (“#TitusAndronicusChallenge or something like that?”). When he dismisses that idea, they suggest a pivot to synth pop. His day plays out in a sequence of deflating interactions that make the episode feel like a structural mirror of A Charlie Brown Christmas—both chronicle a melancholy idealist as they process the commercialization of something they cherish.
“STACKS” isn’t required viewing. The acting is stiff and the pacing is pokey, but it’s punctuated by moments of inspiration, especially a barroom cypher where Stickles throws down some surprisingly spirited raps about narrow-minded critics: “The last shit that I dropped was A Productive Cough/The media greeted it with a reductive scoff.” The relatively cold reception to 2018’s A Productive Cough can’t help but cast a shadow over An Obelisk and its gripes about the music industry (as Stickles testifies on opener “Just Like Ringing a Bell,” “They’re making a dirty fortune selling something that’s barely working, an inferior version of rock’n’roll or whatever else has touched your soul.”) But Stickles preemptively refutes any suggestion that An Obelisk’s rowdiness is a response to that record. It was always the plan to follow up that more acoustic album with a punk rock one, or so his sitcom insists in an interview with a condescending music journalist.
It’s just a happy coincidence, then, that the new record corrects much of what didn’t work about the last one. A Productive Cough felt more like a genre exercise than a passion project, and that’s true of An Obelisk, too, except this time the genre is a far better fit. Produced by Bob Mould and recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio, it’s the band’s shortest album (38 minutes) and by far their leanest (even 2012’s Local Business, which seemed streamlined at the time, was only stripped down in comparison to the Civil War epic it followed).
Where Titus Andronicus once made a statement out of bloat, here they do it with brevity. Two consecutive songs clock in at under a minute and a half, including the 68-second standout “On the Street.” With its “There’s too many police” rally cry, that song is Stickles’ most overt attempt to write an archetypal oi! anthem—and it really does sound like something anarcho-punks might have rioted to circa 1978—but the entire album is peppered with callbacks to punk’s glory years, from the “Clampdown” stop/starts of “Within the Gravitron” to the pint-raising Pogues breakdown of “Hey Ma.”
Though it isn’t as elaborately themed as Titus Andronicus’ most celebrated work, there’s an arc to An Obelisk. From an opening stretch that literally includes a song titled “(I Blame) Society,” Stickles gradually stops pointing fingers and begins interrogating himself, considering his own complicity in systems he abhors. “I say that I’m innocent but it isn’t true,” he fesses in a Johnny Rotten snarl on “Beneath the Boot.”
After exfoliating its sour facade, An Obelisk ends on a constructive note. In keeping with the record’s ’70s pub rock undertones, closer “Tumult Around the World” plays like Stickles’ own “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” an uplifting plea for empathy. “There’s tumult around the earth/But everywhere, there’s people dreaming and people holding on to hope,” he sings, abandoning cathartic punk sloganeering for earnestness and an implicit vow to be one of those people. His opinion of the music industry may not have improved any, but at least his view of humanity has.
