Irresistible Bliss

Irresistible Bliss, album No. 2, takes the band several steps further: at once tighter and more personal, displaying the band's intuitive rapport as players and neatly balancing the eccentric and the accessible. Soul Coughing have attracted wall-to-wall praise from the likes of Rolling Stone ("brilliant" and "four stars"), Entertainment Weekly ("The most affecting rock-funk fusion since Talking Heads"), The New Yorker ("One of the best records of 1994") and Alternative Press ("Either hopelessly smug bastards...or some of the most profound musicians to emerge from Clinton America").

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For a group that exudes so much intelligence and sophistication, Soul Coughing make incredibly intuitive music. The New York foursome gets pinned for its downtown neo-beat poetry shtick, but even M. Doughty, the group's acid-tongued lyricist, will tell you it's really all about the vibe, not the verse: the true leaders are the guys bringing up the rear. Sebastian Steinberg's loping upright bass and Yuval Gabay's precision drums, which form a live hip-hop/jazz-rock base, make Soul Coughing's second album, Irresistible Bliss, even sharper and more rhythmically confident than their 1994 debut, Ruby Vroom. Inverting George Clinton's maxim, Soul Coughing's operating principle seems to be "Free your ass and your mind will follow." As on Ruby Vroom, Doughty's vocals (increasingly dynamic) and Mark De Gli Antoni's keyboard sampler (increasingly focused) form the icing on Irresistible Bliss's groove-filled cake. But like the bass and drums, the voice and sampler work on a subconscious level. Neither conveys concrete meaning so much as it regurgitates data. Like a television set that plays down the hall while you drift off to sleep, Soul Coughing transmit repeated and recontextualized cliches as if they were information-age mantras, and collide those with door squeaks, elephant sounds, and Raymond Scott cartoon music to form a blanket of pop-cultural white noise. If Irresistible Bliss is less referentially hip-hop and (therefore) more song-oriented than the previous album, it's just as enthusiastically geometric--not to mention funky. Or, to transpose Clinton again: Who says a rock band can't play funk?--Roni Sarig

 

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