About
New York City's downtown art scene gave birth to Soul Coughing in 1992, a band that defied easy categorization from day one. Fronted by the verbose and charismatic M. Doughty, whose spoken-word-meets-rap vocal style set him apart from virtually every rock frontman of the era, the group rounded out its sound with bassist Sebastian Steinberg, drummer Yuval Gabay, and sampler wizard Mark De Gli Antoni. That combination of live instrumentation and looping samples was genuinely unusual for the time, pulling from jazz, hip-hop, and indie rock in equal measure.
The band released three albums during their run: Ruby Vroom in 1994, Irresistible Bliss in 1996, and El Oso in 1998. Ruby Vroom remains the fan favorite, a dense and hypnotic record that felt unlike anything else on the shelf. Their biggest mainstream moment came with Super Bon Bon and Circles, songs that got genuine radio traction without the band ever really compromising their weird, loopy sensibility. Soul Coughing broke up in 2000 amid well-documented tension between Doughty and his bandmates, with Doughty later going solo and occasionally revisiting the catalog. Their influence on the alternative and indie scenes of the late nineties is quietly significant, a band that proved you could be genuinely strange and still connect with a real audience.
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