REVIEW: Soul Coughing, El Oso (Slash)
- Lang Whitaker
I'm a believer, and I have been for a while. Much like the Macintosh computer community, it takes a certain zealotous sort to follow Soul Coughing. Ever since I first sipped the sonic concotion of their debut album, Ruby Vroom, I've been hooked.
However, like a spurned Mac addict forced to use Windows at work, the lack of commercial success that has marked Soul Coughing's career has been maddening to me. Even though I recognize the incredible mixture of sound and fury that personifies Soul Coughing, I don't understand how anyone else misses the beauty.
Soul Coughing's latest release, the unfettered El Oso, takes the band deep into humid jungle territory. Stacking layers of harmony on top of lead singer/guitarist M. Doughty's earnest singing, Soul Coughing finally allows the drum-and-bass/club sound that they've tried to subvert through the years to surface. Surprisingly, the band thrives in the thick brush, using melody and rhythm to hack through the vines and escape the label cannibals calling for commercial success.
For the most part, the melodic guitar jangles from Doughty that used to be the basis of many Soul Coughing songs are gone. Instead, the focus of El Oso is on the bottom, and baby got back. Drummer Yuval Gabay, always phenomenal live, is finally given room to strut his stuff. Gabay is fabulous at mimicking the insistence of a drum machine. On several songs (like "), Gabay's beats are mind boggling. Bull fiddler Sebastian Steinberg is not as essential on El Oso as on past records, but he still turns in tight performances. Mark De Gli Antoni, SC's sample man, knows exactly when to dub in a whir here, a buzz there, or a Chris Rock snippet ("$300").
The lead single off of El Oso is the loopy "Circles", a melodic yet intensely convoluted trip. There is a strong geographical connection on El Oso, as many songs have some sort of atlased reference ("Houston", "Pensacola", "The Incumbent"). On the whole, the subject matter of El Oso is less coherent than on either Vroom or Irresistible Bliss. On El Oso Doughty strings together phrases and words that make no sense next to each other ("roller boogie mother fucker"), and then he repeats those phrases until you find some odd sense of being at home in them.
As Soul Coughing continues their perilous journey towards stardom, I just hope they continue on at their own pace. There's no reason to believe they won't.
