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.
Reaching is commendable, but ultimately this feels like a throat-clearing before better things to come.
