If You're White Bread And You Know It, Cough!

To understand Soul Coughing, one must start at the beginning--the Soul Coughing Web Page. Here, you can take the first step to being a stalker and get a little personal information about the band. Eventually, you start hanging around the site long enough to start posting on their little bulletin board (visited by some guy named Dave Matthews...or maybe it's just another stupid Internet psuedonym thing). And then you decide to attend one of their concerts, you twenty-something white person who can do that Blues-Traveler-concert-goer undulating thing that you're supposed to do with bands like this.

I entered the Paradise Rock Club as the only person of any non-Caucasian ethnicity at all. Actually, I take that back--there was one other Asian guy in the place, but he had a notepad and kept complaining to his friend how he'd never heard of this band, and that he'd rather cover the Mode reunion. Half the crowd had the look of a Whitesnake-Nelson doublebill audience, and the other half wore the J. Crew + Birkenstocks attire that infested the HORDE festival. Everyone came with their girlfriend--women who all got together and conspired to resurrect the late '80s Aerosmith video dancer look.

My only experience with Soul Coughing comes from a brief encounter after they opened up for The Dave at the FleetCenter earlier this month--a venue unsuited for their musical style and their crowd, too. That combined with the heavily rotated "Soundtrack to Mary" (which one sometimes will hear after "Missing" on Kiss 108 and before any Mariah song) sums up what I was expecting.

So onstage they came, carting a bass, a keyboard, one guitar, a computer and drumsticks. I think a more appropriate name for the band would be Beckphish. But that would detract from the fact that this is a genuinely original band that plays better live than on tape. The almost two hour set included all the songs off their touted debut, Irresistible Bliss and a few knucklers thrown in by lead singer M. Doughty.

Midway into the first encore, Doughty belted out the first few words of "Like a Prayer," which the rest of the crowd repeated back, and his recital of "Day in the Life" drew the applause and whistles of many slightly older members of the crowd. Songs like "Super Bon Bon" with its wicked uptempo chorus forced many others and me into that head-nodding-and-shaking-back-and-forth motion. Doughty's onstage mannerisms mimic Rage lead singer Zack De La Rocha, and if the lyrics were about some abused people somewhere, I wouldn't have noticed the difference.

Most riveting, though, is the keyboard and sampling of Mark De Gli Antoni. Moving from swing music to random movie quotes (the prevailing fad of alternative music today), he contributes to the measured chaos of Soul Coughing. This is a sound that won't create a Dead following, or break into the mainstream a la Hootie (and who would want to?), but it will captivate club audiences and generate some fine bootleg tapes to exchange for that DMB at UVA concert.