Entertainment :: Music
Sad Man Happy Man by Timothy Gabriele
EDGE ContributorTuesday Oct 6, 2009Soul Coughing’s secret weapon was always keyboardist/sample technician Mark De Gli Antoni. While it’s proper to think of the group as an ensemble, De Gli Antoni’s truly eccentric choices of off-center samples and noisy sound effects always completed the equivocation hidden in each song’s bohemian grooves. Critics at the time though reveled in lyricist and frontman Mike (or "M.") Doughty’s acrid wordplay which skated delicately between PoMo absurdism and noetic sagacity rightly hostile toward Western society’s PoMo absurdism, but Soul Coughing were great because they were sonically adventurous.
Doughty’s is the only career to have survived Soul Coughing. Coming from a group of ex-Downtown arty types who met thanks to their proximity to John Zorn’s power network, and whose final album bore both their biggest buzz hit and a number of forward-thinking techstep numbers produced by occasional scenius participant Optical, Doughty’s early work was treasonous to those who mistook it for a sincere bid for the coffee house (that he would later write songs about destroying the local Starbucks that actually got airtime in the local Starbucks didn’t help matters). Though acoustic, "Skittish" was a stripped, desolate, and shaken plea written from the depths of drug addiction. Self-released in extremely limited copies at first, Skittish found Doughty arming himself with CD-Rs and a rental car and taking to an exhaustive non-stop touring schedule aimed at rebuilding his career and his life from scratch.
On those tour dates, Doughty would complement his semi-bummer new material with a stroll down "the avenue of hits"-ie, acoustic covers of his Soul Coughing songs. Now, thanks to endorsements from everyone from Dave Matthews to Grey’s Anatomy, Doughty has a completely renovated and remodeled (and somewhat gentrified) "avenue of hits" that can be said to fit into the singer-songwriter aesthetic championed by the expanding universe of post-graduate American bildungsroman films.
With this hard-fought historical struggle for relevancy secured, "Sad Man Happy Man" seeks to gently transition the new fans away from the safety of the smallest of his "small rock". Unfortunately, gentle transitions don’t always make for the most engaging listens. "Sad Man Happy Man" definitely bears the best and most interesting production of a Doughty project since the Soul Coughing years, and his lyrics are perhaps the most solid since "Skittish," despite occasionally stretching to rhyme words like "stars" with words like "meteors". But there’s also a sense to which his self-referencing, his re-appropriation of the Soul Coughing live staple "(He’s Got the) Whole World (in his Hands)", and his recycling of certain riffs, obscures his apparent ambitions.
Sad Man Happy Man seeks to gently transition the new fans away from the safety of the smallest of his "small rock". What ultimately saves the album from wreckage is the ways in which Doughty brings back the spirit of Mark De Gli Antonio to these recordings. With an apparent electronic album in the works, Doughty flourishes his latest songs with those ornamental flourishes that gave much of Soul Coughing’s best a neighborly relationship with the 90’s dub continuum (see particularly the "Weirdo Dub" of "Sugar Free Jazz").
At worst, these novelty production dressings are glittery pop glosses that don’t derail the latte breeze of the unplugged Folkways, even if they might slightly clash with the rootsy vibe. The didgeridoo twang and reversed keypads seem less essential to the motivational "(I Keep on) Rising Up" than the elephantine wails of Lee Perry’s Congos recordings, but they’re still a welcome embellishments to a mostly trad rock hook. Less welcome are the hepcat raps of "Pleasure on Credit" and "(He’s Got the) Whole World (In His Hands)", which is an awkward and stilted shtick with lonely acoustic guitars at the forefront. With a full band backing in Soul Coughing, not to mention the percussive complexity of Yuval Gabay, Doughty could transform his white boy rapping into either Q-Tip or Amiri Baraka at a moment’s notice, but here he sounds like a cliché the otherwise wise songwriter should have caught on to.
At best, the man can make his screechy bowed strings and backwards masking bear him a slight resemblance to Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Magnum, to whom Doughty paid homage several years back with a cover of "The King of Carrot Flowers pt. 1". "Nectarine (Part Two)", "Year of the Dog", and "Lorna Zauberberg" are three that are definitely heavily under the influence, which is a good thing. Yet, the electronic harmonies at the end of "How to Fuck a Republican" are the most interesting thing on the album and they only last about 30 seconds. As they end, you almost beg them to continue, or wish they had persisted throughout much else of the familiar jangling.
There is one final sign that Doughty may be able to break free from the borders his friendly persona has self-imposed. At the end of "Lord Lord Help Me Just to Rock Rock On", a more anthem like and upbeat number that rocks on just fine, Doughty lets loose, perhaps for the first time in his recorded career, a primal scream of notable cathartic resonance. Even at his most acidic and his most confessional, Doughty has rarely seen his voice waver out of its cool comfort zone. Perhaps now, he’s ready to take his music further than the avenue of hits.
by Mike Doughy
Timothy Gabriele is currently lives in Philadelphia where he is a freelance writer looking to score big on the boulevard of free thought. He keeps track of things and provides the occasional insight at
555 Enterprises, his blog.
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