CONCERT REVIEW: Soul Coughing, Boston, September 12
- Chelsea Spear
Though the calendar had turned and fall had ostensibly commenced a week before, Mother Nature smiled upon New England on the second weekend of September. The sun beat down on the banks by the Charles River at a degree of about 84 degrees, a breeze wafted off the river, and a crowd of several thousand new and returning students and their friends and neighbors rode a groove from the funky music filling the air. The soundtrack punctuating this bucolic scene was none other than Soul Coughing. This acerbic, dance-inducing quartet graced the stage of the Hatch Shell to celebrate the impending release of their third album, El Oso with a set that blended older favourites with new tracks.
Sadly, the songs from El Oso were the ones that worked the least well within these live perameters. The latest album yokes the band's musical aesthetic to a drum-and-bass beat, and tracks propelled mostly by the canned-sounding breakbeats fell flat under the circumstances; open-air concerts don't provide the best acoustics for distinctive, techno-informed music, and the songs hinging on the use of a drum machine sounded indistinguishable from one another. The standout track amongst these was "Circles", a delightful nugget of arid, acoustic guitar-driven melody and chunky rhythm that has appropriately been chosen as the first single. Another untitled new tune made excellent use of a cinematic, ambient-influenced keyboard midsection, which ran on a rhythm that invoked the pulse of great cities at night, recalling Yo La Tengo's "Moby Octopad".
The electronica-influenced sound with which the 'Cough are presently experimenting worked better within the perameters of their previous hits. Set opener "Screenwriter Blues" made excellent use of a theremin-sounding keyboard effect that intensified the creative angst that the song illuminated to eerie affect in words and music alike, and "Bus to Beezlebub", which featured a new arrangement that included a sped-up bridge with one of the drum tracks fron an El Oso song; the band sped up and slowed down their delivery of the song, until it sounded like a record being changed from 16rpm to 78 with some pauses in between. And though the band's sound may not have always come off without a hitch, they were a tight, cohesive live unit with the presence of consumate showmen. Lead singer M. Doughty made for a magnetic frontman that blended eggheaded intelligence with suave bravado to excellent affect.
Local heroes the Gigolo Aunts opened the show with a set that riffed, buzzsawed, and hummed with energy, but never broke into a gallop -- or tried something other than the midtempo in which all their songs were played. Unlike Soul Coughing, the Aunts never made any brilliant mistakes by pushing the boundaries of what pop music could be, and though they seemed sincere, their music sounded exactly the same as every other band making the scene in town today. They do get points for having an excellent record collection (their cover of the Pretenders' song "Kid" closed their set), and a decent sense of humour (one song was called "To Whoever Keeps Calling Me And Hanging Up, I Hate You").
