Lust in Phaze: A (Kinda Sorta) Soul Coughing Best-Of
Originally published in PopMatters.com.
You don’t know Soul Coughing. You might think you do. You’re wrong.
It’s an easy mistake to make. Here’s the skinny: in a certain part of the nineties, Soul Coughing made some of the weirdest yet accessible music to come out of your car stereo since… well, that’s a tough one to finish. The singles: sublime. The instrumentation: odd. I mean, the band featured an upright bass as a pop instrument. An upright bass, for christ’s sake. They popped and rattled. The lead singer mumbled oblique, maybe-deepish lines like “Fossilized apostle and I comb it with a rake.”
What?
Anyhow. Your Super Bon Bon time with Soul Coughing ran out in 2000. That’s when the band split ways and left In their wake three cool albums, each with the pop-tainted jazz and beat-inspired fuzz-poetry they became known for in New York City back when they were hanging with John Zorn for some reason. Fronted by poet-cum-music-writer-cum-guitarist Mike Doughty, the band captured the essence of jazz, folk, poetry, hip-hop, and whatever else seemed to make the band want to get up and jump. It was a whole feel.
Their recently released compilation, Lust In Phaze: The Greatest Hits of Soul Coughing, demonstrates a slice of the band’s progression over their three albums: from high-speed street poet jazz/pop masters to solid songwriters who made some of their best music while in the throes of hating each other.
Interesting is this—the album’s billed as the “greatest hits,” but it isn’t so much that. It’s more like a grainy family Polaroid. In the scope of Soul Coughing, “hits” is relative. It skirts around fan faves and opts for some deeper cuts that make the scratchy heads. There are, of course, the standard rarities (kind of): “Unmarked Helicopters,” a track culled from the ill-fated X-Files compilation Songs in the Key of X, is a synth-poppy departure (the introduction of the X-Files theme at the fade will be jarring to even the most committed fan.) “Buddha Rhubarb Butter”, a lost track from the Ruby Vroom days, is enjoyable, but leaves you no doubt as to why the nonsensical drum ditty was omitted in the first place. And the Propellerheads’ remix of “Super Bon Bon” is needless fodder, a vagary of kitchen-sink production that could just as well have been ignored.
OK. The greatest hits. Anyone looking for a true “greatest hits” album here, as I said, will be disappointed. That’s an applaudable thing. Rather than throw tracks on an album in a spineless attempt to please fans, the band chose tracks that seem to portray their artistic output as a whole. While the singles are here—to wit, “Super Bon Bon,” “Soundtrack to Mary,” and “Circles”—deep fans will be surprised to learn that some key tracks have been left out. “Soft Serve” from Irresistible Bliss comes to mind. So does “16 Horses,” an arguably better selection from the X-Files movie soundtrack. Instead, we’re presented with tracks like “Bus to Beelzebub” (a good track that unfortunately no one will ever consider a greatest hit) and “Paint,” an interestingly impenetrable mess.
The liner notes, however, are worth the price of admission. Doughty systematically provides background for every song on the album. “Rolling,” for example, extols the virtues of Ecstasy (the drug, dummy, not the fleeting sensation), while “True Dreams of Wichita” is a paean of in-jokes to a real ex-lover who ran off with a bandmate. “St. Louise is Listening” is full of shrouded references to silent movie star Louise Brooks, whom Doughty dubs his patron saint. He’s cool, you dig?
Again, don’t expect a greatest hits package just because it says ‘greatest hits’ on the cover. It’s just more unwieldy than, say, Soul Coughing’s Super Special Picks, or Soul Coughing: These Songs Define Us. While it’s a great introduction to the band from a newcomer’s standpoint, it doesn’t perform the function that a true greatest hits package does—that is, serve as a hastily jangled amalgam of “Band X’s” radio singles. Instead, expect a weird, rough primer—maybe the way a “greatest hits” album should be.