Albums by this artist

Ruby Vroom (1995)

Soul Coughing

Ruby Vroom

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» PIERO SCARUFFI | STAFF WRITER

Soul Coughing Ruby Vroom Warner Bros., 1995 RiYL: Beck, G. Love And Special Sauce, Beastie Boys, Cibo Matto

Soul Coughing's game excursions into new funk first came to light on the 1994 album Ruby Vroom. Theirs, however, is an alienated funk, an immoderate, frayed mutant form that revels in slow-motion jazz, surreal sampling and hip-hop syncopations.

Upright bassist Sebastian Steinberg and drummer Yuval Gabay dominate the sound with their rhythmic prowess. The genial samples purveyed by Mark de Gli Antoni (previously a collaborator with New York experimental music maven John Zorn) continuously make the music stranger, while the poetic soliloquys (more rapped than sung) of frontman M. Doughty lend a philosophical weight to the project.

But there's a real wit to the festivities, and a sense of discovery. "Down To This" sums it up, with its doo-wop choir and fanfare of voices, while "Bus To Beelzebub" sports an almost cartoonish novelty. "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago" rumbles with the best of the Red Hot Chili Peppers' catalog, while "Mr. Bitterness" is propelled by African-tinged percussion. The quartet really gets down to business on the languid "Sugar Free Jazz," the sardonic "Screenwriter's Blues," and the near-Swing parody of "Casiotone Nation."

Ruby Vroom delights with a rhythmic intensity that has not been seen since the heyday of Public Image Ltd. The seemingly haphazard sampling helps soften the rigid rhythmic geometries, allowing the songs to halluncinate toward any possible tangent.

On paper, the band's white rap/funk (especially Doughty's pretensions toward a beat poet persona) could raise some eyebrows in the wrong direction. But in practice, Soul Coughing skillfully integrate various genres with an intellectual and innovative approach.

PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.