Here at Jukebox Graduate, we may be based in Philadelphia, but we’re Jersey boys through and through, and so, even on a day with some other excellent releases (see below), when it came to decide on an album to feature for our first Friday, it had to be Titus Andronicus’ A Productive Cough.
The Shakespearean-titled band hails from Glen Rock, New Jersey and have released some of the best punk music of the last decade. Although they wear their home state proudly on their sleeve with countless references, including the fantastic first verse* to the opening track, “A More Perfect Union”, of their 2010 masterpiece, The Monitor, and appearances at the Jersey-based Shadow of the City festival, this fifth studio album is their New York City joint. Frontman Patrick Stickles lives across the river now and has put some of his experience there across these seven tracks. There’s a cover of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, along with six songs written by Stickles, including singles “Number One (In New York)” and “Above the Bodega (Local Business).”
In a 60-minute documentary directed by Ron Concepcion released earlier this week, Stickles said the following about the new album, which is less of an in-your-face all-out screaming rock album than the band’s previous albums:
“I recognize that the utility of my work is to take these kids who are my audience, whatever their age, they could be older than me, and they come to me and say I’m not really getting the understanding about certain things in regular life, in my place in regular society, you know I try to offer them that and maybe this time I can try to offer it to them in a way where there’s less of the other stuff obstructing the exchange. So there’s still some screaming, I’m still a rocker, but I’m trying to put the communicating first. A lot of the records we’ve made are for being in the car; listening to it with your friends; dancing around, young, dumb drunk dudes punching each other to it; and that’s fine, that’s what they want to do, but this time I just picture me and a member of my audience, whoever they are on a lonely dark night, they’ve got the headphones and I will speak to them about the way things are as I see it, and hopefully, you know, their listening to it and accepting it is going to validate me and my feelings and when they see me asserting these things … they too will be validated, and we will create a sort of validation loop.”
*There’ll be no more counting the cars on the Garden State Parkway
Nor waiting for the Fung Wah bus to carry me to who-knows-where
And when I stand tonight, ‘neath the lights of the Fenway
Will I not yell like hell for the glory of the Newark Bears?
Because where I’m going to now, no one can ever hurt me
Where the well of human hatred is shallow and dry
No, I never wanted to change the world, but I’m looking for a new New Jersey
Because tramps like us, baby, we were born to die
Other albums in stores today that we’re listening to:
Haley Heynderickx – I Need to Start a Garden
Joan Baez – Whistle Down the Wind
Katie Toupin – Moroccan Ballroom EP
Lucy Dacus – Historian
Margaret Glaspy – Born Yesterday EP
Mt. Joy – Mt. Joy
Soccer Mommy – Clean