Soul Coughing is a difficult band to define. Their music has cartoonish qualities but they aren’t Gorillaz. They’re from Alternative Nation but never reached the heights of their commercially successful bretheren. They’re serious musicians but you’d never guess it by the looks of their Cheshire-grinned monkey mascot.
So how does one define Soul Coughing? Easy, by experiencing them live, which has been a difficult thing to do considernig they’ve been broken up for the past 25 years. But that breakup didn’t seem to impact anything onstage Wednesday night when the group’s reunion tour stopped at the Showbox.
Singer Mike Doughty has an oddball charisma that’s as indescribable as his music and his lyrical storytelling and talk-singing captivated the capacity crowd, which sang along and danced to every word. There wasn’t much stage banter or interaction with the adoring crowd, except for when Doughty counted by fives to 100 with the crowd during “Casiotone Nation.” But Doughty made his appreciation known every time the crowd appluaded by holding his hand over his heart while the crowd cheered.
The four-piece band – Doughty, Mark degli Antoni (keyboards/sampler), Sebastian Steinberg (bass), and Yuval Gabay (drums) – played a grooving 90-minute set of quirky tunes which featured odd samples of seagulls and cartoony noises and lyrics about blue-eyed devils and that did things like rhymed Beelzebub with rub-a-dub. See, difficult to define, right?
The group’s songs aged well with funky samples, driving bass and kicking drumbeats providing the perfect backbone for Doughty sometimes silly, sometimes unhinged lyrics (ex: chanting “Yellow Number Five”). And fingers crossed this successful reunion leads to new music because despite not playing together for a quarter of a century, the group sounded tight and all cylinders were firing together to create the wonderfully indescribable sound that is Soul Coughing.
