Records: Soul Coughing's El Oso

By Brian Levinson

A band this good making an album this bad is a sin. El Oso has touches of the bizarre genius that made 1994's Ruby Vroom and 1996's Irresistible Bliss supercool, ultra-listenable experiments in rhythm and sampling. But those infrequent moments on El Oso, buried under layers of grooveless, boring crud, are almost imperceptible. If you listen to the album on headphones, maybe you'd pick 'em out on the third listen.

Lead vocalist M. Doughty's voice still has its unfiltered edge. But on too many of El Oso's songs--like the hideous "Houston" and the dirgy "Maybe I'll Come Down"--it's double-tracked. And listening to him croak in harmony with himself isn't a pleasant endeavor. Drummer Yuval Gabay and bassist Sebastian Steinberg aren't given enough room, and the result is a series of tracks that stick with a lugubrious groove for four minutes. The fact that the songs all sound alike doesn't make the album any better. On Vroom and Bliss, head sampler Mark DeGli Antoni dubbed in unexpected, neat stuff from artists as esoteric as Raymond Scott and Howlin' Wolf, creating novel juxtapositions that made every second worthwhile. But on El Oso, he makes the music a dissonant haze by stringing together a series of computerized bleeps that sound as if they were sampled from Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.

In spite of all this, the album has a few good songs. "Rollin'" is far funkier than anything Soul Coughing has attempted in the past, and, unlike most of the songs on this album, the groove kinda rocks. "Circles" is a pleasant enough pop song, and "So Far I Have Not Found The Science" sounds okay. But they're exceptions to the rule. As a whole, El Oso is good only as a shining example of what happens when a good band gets the wrong idea. (Slash)

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