Long-winded punk plentiful on Titus Andronicus’ Cough
B Titus Andronicus A Productive Cough Merge
Last we heard from this New Jersey punk outfit was 2015’s The Most Lamentable Tragedy, a 29-track, 93-minute rock opera that was frequently brilliant and never dull. So it’s no surprise that the follow-up isn’t quite as sprawling, but it does have the same sort of snarling, ragged ambition that Titus Andronicus has honed over its decade-plus existence.
A Productive Cough, which will be released Friday, contains just seven songs, but three are more than eight minutes long, and one, a Bob Dylan cover that we’ll get to shortly, almost breaks the nine-minute mark. There aren’t any head-bobbing anthems like TMLA’s “Dimed Out” or “Fatal Flaw.” Still, the record has the same about-tofall-apart charm of The Replacements’ Hootenany, the first Pogues album or even a punk Let It Bleed and trades boozy singalongs and ’70s guitar rock for immediate, chest-punch hooks.
Singer-songwriter Patrick Stickles is the band’s guiding force, and his slurred vocals are a sandpaper yawp. He’s also wonderfully contrarian and adventurous. For proof, there’s the first single, “Number One (In New York),” a sort of shambling pub march whose chorus, if you could call it that, doesn’t show up until the six-minute mark.
“Real Talk” is a protest song that sounds like Stickles just grabbed whomever happened to be walking by the studio to play horns and sing background vocals. We mean that as a compliment.
“(I’m) Like a Rolling Stone” is an uproarious take on the Dylan’s sneering classic, though Stickles cleverly flips the song by changing the original’s pronoun “you” to “I,” which turns the classic from an indictment of
someone else to something confessional. It also gets hilarious at the end when Stickles starts name-dropping members of The Rolling Stones and shouts out Stones backup singer Lisa Fischer, among others.
It would be easy to say A Productive Cough is a place-holder record between the next huge Titus Andronicus Project. This is, after all, a band that made The Monitor, a Civil War-theme punk rock concept album from 2010. But there are enough intriguing moments here that make this loose, ramshackle record find its footing.
Hot Tracks: “Above the Bodega (Local Business),” “(I’m) Like a Rolling Stone,” “Crass” — SEAN CLANCY Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
B Franz Ferdinand Always Ascending Domino
Franz Ferdinand’s first new album in five years is practically bursting with new ideas.
Sometimes the Scottish band sounds like it’s rewriting Yaz’s “Situation.” The first single, “Lazy Boy,” sounds like Giorgio Moroder mixed with Pink Floyd guitar riffs. And on “Huck and Jim,” singer Alex Kapranos raps.
All this change makes sense considering everything the band has gone through since the last album. Guitarist and co-founder Nick McCarthy left the band in 2016 to focus on his family. The band’s previous project was to form FFS with new wave pioneers Sparks. And now, Franz Ferdinand includes The 1990s’ guitarist Dino Bardot and Julian Corrie, better known as producer Miaoux Miaoux, on keyboards.
“Huck and Jim” shows how well all the experimentation works. Not only does Kapranos rap over a trap hiphop beat, but the rock chorus is a clever political statement about the need for universal health care that references the characters from Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
On “The Academy Award,” Kapranos croons dramatically in a ballad about how regular life has now become as much of a fictional production thanks to social media, even dropping the internet error message “404 Gateway Not Found” casually into the lyric.
Nothing is simple here. Even “Lazy Boy” twists into something complex. But there is a unifying theme: The struggles of everyday life are unavoidable, but Franz Ferdinand believes they can be overcome by dance-driven hopefulness.
Hot tracks: “Huck and Jim,” “The Academy Award,” “Lazy Boy” — GLENN GAMBOA Newsday (TNS)
C+ MGMT Little Dark Age Columbia
After two albums of willfully experimental psychedelic pop, MGMT return to writing the type of hooks they proved so skilled at on their debut, 2007’s Oracular Spectacular. Musically, Little Dark Age draws a lot on ’80s synth-based commercial pop, such as Hall & Oates, Madonna and Eurythmics, with lots of slightly cheesy backing vocals. But there’s more going on than those period references: MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser again worked with Dave Fridmann, the frequent Flaming Lips producer, so these songs are dense with sonic details that are fun to parse.
It’s a jokey, satiric album, with songs about being tethered to social media (“She Works Out Too Much”) and devices (“TSLAMP,” which stands for “time spent looking at my phone”) in addition to ones about politics (“Hand It Over”) and friendships (“Me and Michael”). But in scoffing and cursing at the modern world’s superficialities, they tend to undermine the depth of the songs themselves.
Hot track: “TSLAMP” — STEVE KLINGE The Philadelphia Inquirer (TNS)