Review Summary: Deep Slacker Jazz goes electric
Soul Coughing has always been a band with no small influence from electronic music. When stripped down to it, they're a rhythm section with a vocalist. The drums and bass have always been prominent on their albums, more so as they progressed through their career. But on their final album, El Oso, they practically dropped any pretense of being a "guitar" band. Resorting to a harsher, lite-industrial sound, they came out with the craziest album of their all-too-short career.
This album has it all. It's got mellow, almost ambient songs (Pensacola, The Incumbent), groovy funk (Circles, Houston), in-your-face rock (Rolling, Monster Man) and just straight up weirdness (300$, So Far I Have Not Found The Science). It's all tied together by a drifting textural soundscape provided by the keyboard/sampler player, and a guitar that blends in so well you forget it's there. It's a surprisingly chill album, even with all the noise and layers and existential dread. It's quite possibly my favorite album of all time, and it can be summed up best in a line from the track Pensacola. "Waves in which you drown me, shouting". That's what this album is. It's a slow onslaught of sound, a drum & bass record gone pop, an experimental hip-hop project, all these things and more. It's an album that will draw you in, scare you, satisfy you. It's the only album like it. Try not to drown.
