Word: albums
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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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...
...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...
...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...
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...
...year that reunited half of Lilith Fair, MIX stumbled badly this year, relying almost completely on the Bare Naked Ladies to draw the crowd.) And after three songs, I decided I would rather listen to them at home. At least it was dry there, and by flipping through their album cover, you can actually see them while you listen. That used to be the point of a concert...