Soul Coughing was a popular New York-based, alternative-rock band formed in the mid 1990s and disbanded in the early 2000s. Soul Coughing developed a devout fanbase and have garnered largely positive response from critics. Steve Huey in Allmusic describes the band as "one of the most unusual cult bands of the 1990s ... driven by frontman Mike Doughty's stream-of-consciousness poetry, Soul Coughing's sound was a willfully idiosyncratic mix of improvisational jazz grooves, oddball samples, hip-hop, electronics, and noisy experimentalism (described by Doughty as 'deep slacker jazz')."
Former members:
- Mike Doughty - vocals/guitar
- Mark De Gli Antoni - keyboards/sampling
- Sebastian Steinberg - bass
- Yuval Gabay - drums
Albums:
- Ruby Vroom (1994)
- Irresistible Bliss (1996)
- El Oso (1998)
- Lust in Phaze (2002)
Tropes that apply to Soul Coughing:
- Alternative Rock
- Anti-Love Song: "Circles", about a man tired of his dull relationship repeating itself and his significant other.
- Biting-the-Hand Humor: "The Bug" from the Batman & Robin soundtrack has a chaotic ending where Mike Doughty can be heard repeatedly muttering something in the background. If you listen carefully, you can make it out as "George Clooney is Satan!"
- Broken Record: Multiple occurrences, especially in "Rolling" and "Circles" - the latter of which is obviously invoked, as it's about a failing relationship that keeps doing the same tired shit over and over again.
- Cluster F-Bomb: "Houston" fades out with the lyric "roller-boogie motherfucker" being repeated about 20 times, seemingly just because the band had decided that was an inherently funny combination of words.
- Fading into the Next Song: On El Oso, "Houston" fades into "$300".
- Funk Rock
- Greatest Hits Album: Lust in Phaze
- Lyrical Tic: Mike Doughty tends to pronounce an additional vowel at the ends of lines that end stanzas ("When you were languishing in rooms I build to file you in-uhh / And when the wind set down in funnel-form and pulled you in-uhh")
- Miniscule Rocking: The one minute B-Side "Theme From Rachel's Sitcom".
- Post Grunge: While most of their stuff is jazzy (or at least jazz influenced), it's most obvious in "Rolling", which is about racing - and, being faster-paced and more heavy than the rest of the album, it shows.
- Recycled Lyrics: the bridge to "Miss The Girl" ("I dream that she aims to be the bloom upon my misery") is recycled from a Mike Doughty solo song called "I Failed To Use It".
- Sampling: Most prevalent in Ruby Vroom, but used sometimes throughout their career. The most prominent uses of this may be "Bus To Beelzebub" and "Disseminated", both heavily based around Raymond Scott samples ("Powerhouse" and "The Penguin", respectively).
- Scatting: One of the band's trademarks. "Paint" is almost all scatting - Mike Doughty had written the chorus lyrics before the verses and started scatting as lyrical filler, then decided to just keep the verses as mostly nonsense syllables.
- Shout Out: The bridge to "Casiotone Nation" includes lyrical nods to Fugazi's "Waiting Room" and the title theme to Yor: The Hunter from the Future.
- Doughty's description of the band's music as "deep slacker jazz" is a reference to The Who's billing as "Maximum R&B".
- Word Salad Lyrics: Also one of the band's trademarks.
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