Since the release of its 1995 debut album, "Ruby Vroom," and continuing through and beyond last spring's release of the follow-up "Irresistible Bliss," Soul Coughing has toured relentlessly. Tonight, the band's almost non-stop barnstorming brings it to the Majestic in Detroit.
To attempt to explain Soul Coughing in a nutshell is an unenviable task. The New York quartet's sound is nearly impossible to encapsulate. In a recent interview with The Michigan Daily, drummer Yuval Gabay, when pressed to define his band, laughed, "I'll leave that and let you struggle. It makes for a more interesting write-up." True: The group splatters the influences of hip-hop, jazz, rock, pop, dance and spoken-word across its songs like Jackson Pollock did colors on a canvas.
Frontman M. Doughty's lyrics range from cinematic narrative to beat poetry to alliterative nonsense. Gabay lays down snappy, complex rhythms supplemented by Sebastian Steinberg's pulsating upright bass (according to Gabay, Steinberg's biggest influence is the New York City subway - he wants to sound like a train). Sprinkled liberally within it all are Mark De Gli Antoni's samples: Song snippets from jazz to Tori Amos and sounds from seagulls to subways are likely to pop up anywhere and everywhere.
Together, the four create a groove-laden, streetwise and remarkably cohesive combo platter that is equal parts impressionism, musical channel-surfing and organized aural chaos. Moods range from the laid-back, ultracool tones of "Lazybones" and "Sugar Free Jazz" to the frenetic "Bus to Beelzebub" and "Super Bon Bon," and everywhere in between. Sometimes different moods exist within the same song, as in the jaw-dropping debut single from "Ruby Vroom," "True Dreams of Wichita." Gabay likened the band's sound to Lucky Charms cereal: "Because of the sweetness and the variety of colors, not to mention the sugar rush!"
Critical acclaim and a hip national following have come rather quickly to the group, which was formed more than four years ago in a small New York club called the Knitting Factory. Doughty worked as a doorman there and the others played regularly with other bands. "Doughty was doing his guitar, singy-songy thing at the time. He managed to book a gig for, like, Tuesday at 3 in the morning," Gabay recalled.
Doughty, who had heard and met Steinberg and Gabay when they played the club, asked the two to back him. He also invited De Gli Antoni because he "knew he had a sampler," Gabay said. "I said, 'Hmm, why not?' Doesn't seem like I had anything better to do on Tuesday at three in the morning." And thus Soul Coughing came together for the first time.
The group gigged sporadically for six months before deciding to officially band together. It took its name "from a friend who used that term for throwing up one day," Gabay said. "Doughty actually wrote a poem about that that nobody liked - except the title."
In those early days, the band began to develop a reputation as an energetic and adventurous live act, a trait that has been the foundation of much of its current popularity. "We played in a lot of small venues in New York when we were starting out, and it was more based on, you know, like having a party," Gabay said. "I think we have tried to maintain that vibe as much as we can. Even though we play in much, much bigger rooms now, (we) still try to make that same kind of a fun, party atmosphere. It just really makes everybody feel that they're on the inside; you know, audience and band. And that's important for us to keep it that way.
"We're really working at the grassroots level," he continued. "We go to every town and we play, and we go to another town and we play. And (we) come back to that (first) town and we got a few more people. We're really building it from the bottom up."
Everywhere the band has travelled, it has found people longing for something new and unique. Gabay explained that, contrary to what radio programmers and other tastemakers would have us believe, music fans "are open enough to take anything. The general audience is so much more open and ready for new stuff and in fact, more appreciative of new stuff than any radio people or any fuckin' marketing people."
And that's fine with Gabay and his bandmates. Looking to what appears to be a rosy future, the group plans to continue to build its fan base through touring, then they hope to record a new album next summer. Their collective goal, Gabay laughed, is to "make the youngsters happy, as we are happy. And smiley. And sad!"
So get out to the Majestic tonight and get happy. And perhaps you should take some of Gabay's advice beforehand, "Eat Lucky Charms!"
Soul Coughing has a metal ring fettish.