Coughing Bears: Fracturing the Narrative and Other Misadventures

EL OSO

Soul Coughing

Slash Records

If we're very, very lucky, it happens. A miracle of nature. After waiting patiently for what seems years, we notice a slow emergence. The cocoon breaks and out of the depths of cynical garage-rock and tortured, pre-millenial angst there climbs a thing of radiant beauty--a wonder of nature so luminous and pure that we can do nothing but raise our tear-filled eyes to the heavens, sigh in complete abandon and carefully begin to shake some serious booty.

Soul Coughing burst into the world four years ago from the depths of New York's underground club scene. When their first album, Ruby Vroom, spread its funkified wings in 1994, thousands of hungry, pulsing teenagers gasped. Here, at last, was a thing of beauty. Here, at last, was something that made you go "Oh God, yeah, Oh God, I wanna, God, I wanna DANCE." Body-throbbing funk with a deep, heavy low-end, witty lyrics that read like poetry and presuppose (gasp) intelligent listeners, and the seductively quirky voice of lead singer Michael Doughty all melded together on Ruby Vroom to create nothing short of a miracle. Their second album, Irresistible Bliss, released in 1996, lost some of the momentum of Ruby Vroom (primarily because of the large number of bitter love ballads), although Soul Coughing found themselves a few steps closer to fame due mostly to the success of the upbeat, radio-friendly tune, "Super Bon Bon."

Thankfully, with their newest album, El Oso, Soul Coughing revives and even surpasses the enormous energy and excitement of Ruby Vroom. Every lovable aspect of Soul Coughing is present on El Oso in beautifully magnified forms. The beat, for one, is absolutely unforgettable. Soul Coughing has always carefully crafted their music around a strong, supremely danceable groove influenced heavily by hip-hop and funk. Their trademark beat is something they descriptively term a "gangadank", or as Doughty describes it in the album's press release "a kind of guitar rhythm I invented in an attempt to recreate a hip-hop groove on an acoustic guitar--it goes gankadank, gank-duh-did-dank."

Beyond this fun acoustic funk (of which El Oso has lots), Soul Coughing branches out with the beat on El Oso into realms they've never been before. From the opening of the album, it is clear that the beats will be the most prominent and experimental aspect of the album. The first song, "Rolling," opens with drummer Yuval Gabay pounding a quick, charged drum and bass beat, followed immediately by stand-up bassist Sebastian Steinberg's entrance with low bowed bass notes as keyboardist/sampler-man Mark Di Gli Antoni inserts an eerie, ambient synth line. Electronica is slowly creeping into their homemade style, creating an effective menagerie of beats. Gabay seamlessly incorporates jungle and drum and bass beats throughout the album under Doughty's sung funk-poetry. British drum and bass master Optical (who has mixed for, among others, Goldie, Metalheadz and Grooverider) mixed two songs on the album, "Blame" and "The Incumbent," adding interesting ambient samples and the urgency of a jungle beat without compromising Soul Coughing's individual style in the process.

The obvious electronica influences on El Oso never separates Soul Coughing from their true style; rather, the widely disparate influences evident on the album are exactly what Soul Coughing needed to gracefully mature from experimenters to true innovators. Soul Coughing finally take full advantage of overdubbing techniques they hesitantly used on their two previous albums to push their music into a realm where electronica, funk, distorted double-voiced lyrics, whistles, duck quacks, heavy bass, strings, weird speakers, guitars and classical piano merge into a miraculous synthesis of noise, beats and poetry. One of the best songs on the album, "Misinformed," opens with funky low toms accented by pounded anvils and noises straight out of the Legend of Zelda, followed by a synthesized melody from what sounds like a tunable whoopie cushion. Bubbling out of this conglomeration of noise and rhythm comes Doughty, singing his own special brand of witty and penetrating poetry.

Ah, the poetry. As if the pulsating, infectious beat and the endlessly hypnotic layers of sounds weren't enough, Doughty (who, incidentally, studied poetry at New York's New School) masterfully implants probing poetry into every one of Soul Coughing's tunes. Although the words are sometimes cryptic and confusing, as a whole Doughty's lyrics on El Oso weave a massive chain of striking images and seductive rhymes. Just as the music has grown into the perfect amount of experimentation and wackiness, Doughty's lyrics have matured significantly from the fun, lighthearted poetry of Ruby Vroom.

The lyrics on El Oso move through all the typical themes: lost love, the open road, drug addiction and self-glorification. What makes the lyrics of the album exceptional is the constant tension Doughty and Co. create between the words and the music. "Pensacola," perhaps the most beautiful song on the album, is an excellent example of Soul Coughing's elegant alliance between sound and language. The song opens with an underwater, ambient effect of waves of bass and high synth strings. Doughty enters with a uncharacteristically melancholy and amazingly seductive voice to sing about suffocating love. As the line "like waves in which you drown me shouting, waves in which you drown me shouting" repeats almost endlessly, the waves of bass and Doughty's hypnotic voice meld into a virtually indistinguishable pulse of sound.

Because Soul Coughing is so elegantly able to meld beats to words, the only places on the album where Soul Coughing obviously falters are the few moments where the music and language do not quite fit together. Occasionally, the lyrics get a little caught up in exorbitant verbosity and leave the music stumbling behind. "St. Louise is Listening" (a song as close to garage rock as Soul Coughing gets) and "Maybe I'll Come Down" (a bland ballad that strains Doughty's voice and listener's patience) are two songs that should have remained poems. In both, a surplus of syllables obviously constrains the music--Doughty is overly intellectual and whiny, the instrumentation is weak, and the beat sounds like it was churned from a cheap drum-machine.

Ultimately, the coughing souls we love are at their eloquent best when the music rocks itself and the words flow in to support the body-thumping beat. Luckily, El Oso is primarily filled with witty lyrics rapturously entwining themselves around multitextured sounds and heavy, beatific beats. Listening to Soul Coughing, all senses are fulfilled--the body throbs to the beat and the mind pulses to the poetry. Thank heaven for small miracles and for this chance to dance, dance, dance.