Word: soulfully
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...