Soul Coughing

For a hot minute in the late '90s, Soul Coughing was quite an underground phenomenon, and this is the album that started it all. Seamlessly and artfully combining sample-strewn sound collage, electro-tweaked jazz and thrumming acid funk with M. Doughty's garrulous pop poetics, Ruby Vroom (named after Suzanne Vega's daughter with musician Mitchell Froom) is intellectual brain candy at its best. If there was ever a direct legacy from 1950s Beat jazz abstraction to the present, it's songs like "Casiotone Nation" and "Moon Sammy," impressionistic ditties both inspiring and frustrating in their far-flung imagery and avant-pop groove.

Rap & roll exploded five years ago, long enough to spawn a second generation, mongrelized
by even more influences and hence more sophisticated. Beck, Bobby Sichran and G. Love
and Special Sauce have already staked out this territory, but Soul Coughing – with
reference points like the O'Jays' "For the Love of Money," William Burroughs records,
Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing," 1991's landmark Unplugged rap show, Big Au... More >

If it was down to M. Doughty's hipster cynicism and summer-stock declaiming, this would be a novelty act not unlike Tonio K., whose shouted studio speed-rock provided a nonpunk corrective to Jackson Browne. But the music isn't just second-rate poetry-with-fusion backup. Standup bassist Sebastian Steinberg (dig his "Misterioso" under "Casiotone Nation") and chopswise drummer Yuval Gabay (hear him threaten to fly off the track on "Blueeyed Devil") remain up front, while keyb man M'ark De Gli Antoni (that's what it says) orchestrates synthesizer and sampler for atmosphere, commentary, and plain old cheap thrills. Not that the music isn't more compelling when Doughty hits his satiric targets, the easy ones included. (Grade - A)