'Coughing' Up a Hip Storm

Soul Coughing

April 19

at the Paradise

These days, to fit the mold seems to be the most common refrain of popular music. Although this trend is by no means new, the music industry's ever-expanding tentacles have squeezed more and more original talents into discrete and binding marketing categories. What made the New York City quarter Soul Coughing's show at The Paradise so worthwhile was the bizarre, original nature of their music, a style which largely defies classification.

Soul Coughing consists of M. Doughty as singer and occasional guitarist, Sebastion Steinberg on upright basses, M'ark De Gli Antoni handling the keyboards and samples, and Yuval Gabay on drums. Their music is a blend of very danceable bass and keyboard sounds and samples with surreal, beat-like vocals by Doughty. On the tune, "Sugar Free Jazz," for instance, "They normalize the signals and you're banging on freon,/Paleolithic eons, put the fake goatee on/and it booms as cool as, sugarfree jazz."

Any worry about the quality of a live performance of a band that relies heavily on keyboards and sampling was immediately dispelled when Soul Coughing started playing. The bass and drums seemed much more alive than they do on album. The eerie rhythm-heavy tune "Bus to Beelzebub" was the first song of the set. The performance far out did the album version. The song's chanting, repititious lyrics were intense and entrancing.

Their next tune, "Casiotone Nation," was another example of a song that benefited from live performance. One of the weaker tracks on the impressive 1994 release, Ruby Vroom performed live it rose to another level in terms of energy and potency. The band even fiddled with the lyrics, working "the people's republic of Cambridge" into the song. The lyrics of the song are more of a collage of sentence fragments than a coherent piece. The song's dance-feel really got the croud moving. It was nice to see a (rare) show where the crowd danced, as opposed to merely slamming into one another arhythmically.

Although a vast majority of the songs played were from the Ruby Vroom album, there were about five new additions.

The bands was very playful in its interactions with the crowd. Whether it was lip-synching along with a sample, or dancing like a funked-up Rutger Hauer android, Doughty was a singer with a lot of charm and charisma. When someone shouted for the song "Janine," without hesitation doughty responded, "Janine's not here right now." The whole band seemed to be enjoying themselves, which always improves a show.

One of the best songs of the evening was "True Dreams of Wichita." Announced as being "the make-out number for the evening," "True Dreams" might be one of the more unconventional love songs ever written. Then again, it might not be a love song at all. With lines like, "I'm half drunk on babble you transmit," and "you can stand on the arms of the Williamsburg bridge,/ crying hey man well this is Babylon," it is really hard to tell. The song, a slow bass-heavy number, at one point speeds up dramatically. This transition worked especially well in concert; the band busted from the slow melodic to the jarring rhyming section with a powerful urgency. So Coughing also displayed its ability to tinker creatively with their songs, with Doughty slipping effortlessly into the first verse of the Beatle's "A Day in the Life," at the end of "True Dreams."

The band used a similar technique later on, breaking into Black Sabbath's "War Pigs" at the end of "Down to This," which closed the band's set. The sample-laden "Down to This" was the most intensely danceable tune of the evening, working the audience into a frenzy that kept them crying for more until the band came out for its first encore.

The crowd went wild upon hearing the opening bars of the first encore, "Screen Writer's Blues." Opening with the surreal lines "exits to freeways twisted like knots on the fingers/jewels cleaving skin between breasts," "Screenwriter's Blues" is a lyrical masterpiece, a fascinating Beat-inspired attack on the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. The deal pan, nearly-spoken delivery of the lines together with the repeating bass line and horn-like keyboard sounds, created the type of mesmerizing tune that lingers in the subconcious well after the show's end.