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The music of Manhattan's Soul Coughing hasn't changed all that
drastically since they were slotted as rapper wannabes on their
1994 debut, Ruby Vroom. M. Doughty still declaims rather than sings
over a bed of textured polyrhythms. But on their third album,
El Oso (Slash/Warner Bros.), history has caught up with them.
In a musical landscape suddenly littered with swing-claiming hipster
wannabes romanticizing a culture and beat they don't understand,
Soul Coughing come across as the hipsters young half-asses want to
be. Not that they care about horns, leaving that stratum of the
soundscape to the chords and samples of keyboardist Mark De Gli
Antoni. Their heart is Sebastian Steinberg's relentlessly
unpredictable upright bass, which sets Soul Coughing's beat in
motion while remaining far more a lead instrument than Doughty's
vestigial guitar. Doughty's definitive contribution is vocals that
milk all the music out of catch-phrases as general as "I'm rolling"
and as specific as "You don't use words like that/Say Lousie is
listening." "Deep slacker jazz," he once called this stuff. Dig its
swing.
On Thompson Plays Joplin (Daring),
living archivist Butch adds a welcome
smidgeon of rhythmic muscle to the rags of deceased innovator
Scott, who always felt constrained to act more genteel than was
good for him. On Mama Don't Allow No Easy Riders Here (Yazoo),
Depression-era
masters of barrelhouse piano demonstrate where Thompson is coming
from. Maybe the rocking Cow Cow Davenport and the wandering Speckled
Red don't command all of Joplin's delicacy. But you sense that they
could hold their own with him in a fair fight--one where they
struck only the ivories, not each other.
Playboy, Sept. 1998
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Aug. 1998 |
Oct. 1998 |
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