Mr. Bitterness - Soul Coughing
I need a Velvet Crush
This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to catch the antepenultimate (I Googled the word for “third to last”) show of the pleasantly surprising Soul Coughing reunion tour. Soul Coughing is perhaps the cultiest of all cult bands from the 90s. They were never really THAT underground. I mean, they were literally signed to Warner Bros for practically their entire run. However, their sound was never designed to be mainstream, but quite the opposite. The unique combination of white boy flow slam poetry, deep and jazzy upright bass and a keyboardist exclusively playing chopped and screwed samples was not the most accessible act out at the time. The people who love Soul Coughing really love Soul Coughing, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a fanbase with greater allegiance and loyalty.
I’d like to circle back to the “pleasantly surprising” comment I made earlier. In an age of reunion tours popping up like a game of Whack-a-Mole, I don’t know if anyone could have predicted this. Mike Doughty, the vocalist and de facto leader of the band, has made it very clear on numerous occasions, both in speech and print, that this band would never get back together. He despised the band and what it became. Disputes over royalties, substance use, and a perfect shitstorm of other factors created unmatched animosity between the band members. The band was self-aware of the fact that they went back on their word, bringing the We Said It Would Never Happen tour to some of America’s best and most intimate venues.
A New York band through and through, I was ecstatic to score tickets to what would become the band’s first show in the city in 25 years. The show was wonderful. The band seemed in good spirits all around, the crowd was locked in, and, most importantly, the music was wonderful. Though I had an inkling that it would be played due to my impatience and snooping on setlist.fm, the band pulled out one of my favorites of theirs, the unmistakable “Mr. Bitterness.”
The penultimate (I didn’t need to Google this one) track on their beloved 1994 debut, Ruby Vroom, “Mr. Bitterness” is a perfect distillation of everything that made, and as of now makes, Soul Coughing such a compelling band.
I’m gonna come right out and say it. Yuval Gabay is the most underrated drummer of the 90s, and one of the most unheralded drummers of all time. The track begins with maybe his most phat, formidable beat. Making use of his peculiar double snare set-up and octopus-like limb control, what you hear sounds like a traditional drum track blended into a nutritious groove smoothie. I mean, there is so much going on here. The man’s still got it too, pounding away as strong as ever in the big 2024.
Doughty comes in with a patented melodyless, stream-of-consciousness style stanza.
There is a bar they call The Bitter Sea
And she sits and drinks a Velvet Crush
And that's Kool-Aid and gin
Casing the clientele like a relentless cameraman
She is elsewhere
Doughty enriches the mind a bit more before Sebastian Steinberg’s soul-piercing bass comes in alongside some zany Mark degli Antoni samples of indiscernible origin. Also, take note of Gabay’s blistering triplets on the constantly opening and closing hi-hat.
Spiral down, down, down, down, down, down, down
Here we hit on one of the most important ingredients in the Soul Coughing souffle: Doughty’s incessantly catchy repetition. Seemingly every Soul Coughing song has a hook that inevitably seeps into your frontal lobe. Some people hate it, some people love it. I love the way that Doughty uses his vocals as another texture in the musical makeup of the band.
I couldn’t really tell you what this song’s about, other than it having something to do with a woman, perhaps one that left Doughty down and out, in turn creating the titular Mr. Bitterness. In Doughty’s own words, the song is about “boy, girl, automatic weapons, fire, etc.” These themes of sex and violence can be seen in the song’s second verse.
Well, desire looks just like you with an Uzi 9
Gun down fifteen bystanders in a roadside drive-by, yeah
Desire is the grass fire, drinking gasoline
She says, "Open up your mouth, man, let me come inside"
I love the piano sample that comes in unassumingly during the song’s third verse, adding an almost Vaudevillian feel to the track. The musicianship here is off the charts. Soul Coughing is a band greater than the sum of its parts. The fearsome rhythm section, manic monotone ramblings, and wacky cacophony of found sounds could not have been created by four other musicians.
I highly recommend checking out Ruby Vroom as well as the other two Soul Coughing records, Irresistible Bliss and El Oso, as they comprise one of the strongest catalogs of any band from their time. I truly hope the band continues to tour, perhaps reaching destinations overseas so that Soul Coughing fans all over the world can be blessed by their special musical bond. If nothing else, we are moving in the right direction: towards a world where Soul Coughing lives on not just vicariously, but presently, in the here and now.
Listen to “Mr. Bitterness” here.