Midway through a documentary about the making of Titus Andronicus’ fifth album A Productive Cough, lead singer Patrick Stickles seems to question everything his epic New Jersey punk band has done until now. “In my music, it’s like I ask for understanding for myself, and I know that in doing that I’m doing it on behalf of certain members of my audience,” the frontman tells his dad. “But I also push these people away with a lot of screaming sometimes!” Maybe, he reasons, there’s a way he can communicate that understanding more directly, without the barrier of anger and amplifiers, or the threat to snap at any moment. There will still be some screaming, “But really, I’m trying to put the communicating first,” he insists.
Being understood is a reasonable concern for a songwriter who once couched his personal anguish deep in an album-length metaphor for the Civil War on their most storied album, The Monitor. For Titus Andronicus’ last LP, the colossal 2015 rock opera The Most Lamentable Tragedy, Stickles went so far as to annotate his own songs on Genius, but that gesture of comprehension seems slight compared to the fundamental recalibration of the band’s sound he attempts on A Productive Cough. The record tames the band’s usual, roiling rock with looser, jauntier grooves pitched somewhere between the Stones’ rangy early ’70s LPs and Van Morrison’s homages to New Orleans R&B. Where its predecessors played out in sickeningly tense eruptions of guitar, their latest takes the edge off, leaving the band room to kick back and unwind.
Of course, the album’s easygoing musical approach may also reflect the practical necessity for a band like this to scale back from time to time. Titus Andronicus has a pattern of following a massive event album with a smaller one that doesn’t quite scratch the same itch, and A Productive Cough is more focused than The Most Lamentable Tragedy. But even this band’s minor works are an undertaking, and with its 46-minute runtime spread across just seven songs—one of them a first-person reinterpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” that runs a numbing nine minutes—there’s a burdensome heaviness to the record that belies what was presumably meant to be a cheerier, more inviting sound. The music’s supposed to be an escape, yet the album always feels like it’s on the clock.
A Productive Cough sets an odd tone by opening with its most labored, tightly wound track, “Number One (In New York),” an eight-minute address about the State of Titus Andronicus. The gist: The band is still kicking, but nothing’s ever easy. “Declare myself president of the emptiness, say I’m Rembrandt of dancing on the precipice,” Stickles scours in a tattered voice that seems to age a decade between each album, “Eleven years in and trying to stay relevant.” His wordplay is as sharp and generous as ever, but the song unspools at such a torrid pace, toiling so hard for such a modest payoff, that it leaves the listener exhausted before the album even really begins.
And for a band that’s always encouraged deep reads, there isn’t a lot going on under the surface of many of these songs. All boozy Memphis horns and barroom pep, “Above the Bodega (Local Business)” charms out of the gate, but its lyrical conceit amounts to little more than “the guy at the corner store sure must see a lot,” a quaint observation about city life that it stretches very thin. “Crass Tattoo,” about a literal Crass tattoo, is more cleverly literary in its riff on music fandom as a higher calling (“My right arm, I dedicated to that noble cause/To dismantle authority and nullify all laws,” sings Brooklyn musician Megg Farrell, breezily) but its funereal tempo drags down an album that’s already plagued by languid pacing.
The promotional campaign for A Productive Cough has been preemptively defensive, overstating the degree to which the band has shed their punk ties and working from the assumption that a lot of fans are going to hate it; one press release even throws in a jab about infuriating “the black-denim-and-PBR set.” But blaming the album’s reception on straw-man rock fans—the same fans, presumably, that Stickles vows to preach understanding for—is strangely contradictory, especially when the album’s faults are so self-evident. Stickles is a fundamentally bad match for these sounds, and his brusque demeanor clashes with, and sometimes outright deflates, any uplift in this music. His churlish persona can be a blast when his grievances soar past like billboards on a highway, but it’s not nearly so entertaining when you’re locked in close proximity with it for long, ambling exposures. For all its promises of a leisurely, good time, A Productive Cough plays like a quarantine.
