Recently, Punk Rock has been doing some soul-searching. As an audience it feels like we’ve heard it all before. A riff here. An angry young man spitting there. Though there have been a few cases of true originality within the genre (Fucked Up, Sheer Mag, Death Grips, to name a few) the majority of three chord heroes come across as derivative and, whisper it, retro.

Titus Andronicus seemed destined to forever been stuck in the middle of this snotty pack until they shocked us all with the release of The Most Lamentable Tragedy, an opera in five parts, last year. The record, as flawed as it was, distanced the group for the rest of the punk rock pretenders. It was equal parts Sandinista! and Springsteen, who, let’s face it, isn’t your usual thrash messiah.

S+@dium Rock builds on this new found edge, to mixed results. The album was recorded over five nights in New York City’s Shay Stadium venue, and like all live albums, attempts to capture the group at their best. Opener ‘Dimed Out’ hops along like Hüsker Dü on amphetamines, the track swallows the album version whole and spits it out for dinner. Guitars are chewed and drums and ingested as frontman Patrick Stickles yelps about something or other that is bothering him.

Unfortunately, this excitement is almost immediately demolished by some rootin’ tootin’ pub rock. ‘Lonely Boy’ and ‘I Lost My Mind’ seem to last weeks, if not months. While these two tracks were never the strongest on The Most Lamentable Tragedy they somehow seem even more derivative live. It’s almost as if the group have sucked the life out of themselves, like an extremely confused vampire, or a self-harming straw.

‘Into The Void’ single-handedly brings the record back from the dead. This song is what punk rock is all about. It’s scrappy, loud, drunk and ready for a good old fight. This is a side Titus Andronicus need to explore more if they’re ever to jump out of that dastardly middle ground discussed at the head of this piece.

Almost inevitably, the group instantly fall back down into the void. ‘No Future Part V’ sounds like a dodgy offcut from a late Clash album. There is something lacking here that is present on the album version, but it’s hard to know exactly what.

’69 Stones’ continues the descent. The track is nothing more than a toilet break. Slow songs rarely hit home live, and as it turns out that even on record they struggle. Bizarrely though, this track actually makes you need the toilet. It seems Titus Andronicus might have actually created the first loo-break album track, a feat that shouldn’t be ignored. If you listen hard, and I mean really, really hard, you can actually hear the sound of 10,000 drops of urine tickling porcelain urinals. It’s quite beautiful, really.

With S+@dium Rock, Titus Andronicus have managed to create a live record that says everything and nothing at the same time. It might not have discovered punk’s hidden soul, but it did find one thing: Urine Rock.

When it comes down to it, that’s all that really matters. Right?