For Its First Dallas Show in 26 Years, Soul Coughing Transfixes the Longhorn Ballroom

A Soul Coughing performance shimmers.

A Soul Coughing performance undulates.

A Soul Coughing performance electrifies.

Soul Coughing is a band that does not sound like many other bands. There are familiar elements, certainly — drums and bass and keys and guitars and samples — and recognizable genre textures of hip-hop, jazz, pop, rock and slam poetry, but the deliberate messiness with which it is all assembled is transfixing.
That the messiness can pivot to surgical precision on a dime makes the music that much more compelling — so much of watching this New York City-formed quartet work is to feel like seeing a Jackson Pollock created before you in real time. From seeming chaos, beauty emerges.

Added to that built-in wonder the fact that when vocalist-guitarist Mike Doughty, keyboard-sampler player Mark degli Antoni, bassist Sebastian Steinberg and drummer Yuval Gabay casually walked onto the Longhorn Ballroom stage Friday night, it marked the first time in 26 years the group had performed in Dallas.

It was a reunion most fans assumed would never come to pass — indeed, its initial foray into restarting the band last fall was a tour titled “We Said It Would Never Happen.” Soul Coughing’s disintegration in 2000 was remarkable for its acrimony; Doughty’s 2012 memoir, The Book of Drugs, poured salt into the wounds.
Therefore, the sheer improbability of seeing Soul Coughing emerge Friday to cheers and begin to play “Casiotone Nation,” a song from its 1994 debut album, Ruby Vroom, was to feel something bordering on hallucinatory ecstasy. I first encountered the band as a musically omnivorous college freshman in 1999. Soul Coughing sounded like nothing I’d ever heard before. All these years later, they still do.
There wasn’t too much room in the 90-minute set for sentimentality. The restless, bristling Doughty, clad head to toe in black, endlessly prowling the foot of the stage, with the occasional ramrod-straight pause at his mic stand, offered verbal gratitude throughout the night — “Thank you for coming out; we’re very appreciative,” he remarked near the conclusion — but it was in the physical where that thankfulness was most apparent.

You could see it at the conclusion of “True Dreams of Wichita,” as Doughty laid his hand on his chest and gazed at the cheering audience, clustered on the floor, as the seated audience toward the back of the room clapped loudly. You could see it as the foursome moved as a single unit during the ferocious “Bus to Beelzebub,” a demonic loop of composer Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse” propelling the musicians forward toward an explosive climax. 
A Soul Coughing performance quakes.

A Soul Coughing performance seethes.

A Soul Coughing performance stabs.

The highlights were plentiful: Steinberg’s upright bass work was nigh impossible to look away from all night, his gray mane trembling as his fingers worked the fret, occasionally offering backing vocals to Doughty’s adenoidal deadpan. Gabay’s triphammer rhythms, syncopating the samples and keyboard flourishes deployed by degli Antoni. Doughty fussing with his glasses before leaning in to spit a barrage of words, every syllable a rabbit punch in the air, the cadence as martial as a drumbeat or as laid-back as the bend in a river.

Even more striking was that just about every song performed Friday — some 21 in all, inclusive of the encore — elicited a pleased shout from somewhere within the room, which was pleasantly full but not quite cram-packed.

It was a testament to the specificity of Soul Coughing’s catalog, and the band’s resolutely idiosyncratic nature — the songs are often so peculiar and specific, it can feel as if your own personal favorite is yours alone.
Indeed, given the relative obscurity of Soul Coughing, it was downright heartening to see so many Dallas music fans turning out for the show. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the band’s biggest hit, “Circles,” did not provoke an outsized reaction, relative to the other songs played, a definite rarity for this neck of the woods.

Marveling at the see-sawing sweetness of “Soft Serve,” the visceral physicality of “Mr. Bitterness,” the deeply entrancing “Sugar Free Jazz,” or the deliciously scabrous main set-closing “Screenwriter’s Blues,” there was a sense of settling accounts, possibly even exorcising a few ghosts. Soul Coughing may simply take this victory lap, achieve a closure that was forestalled for a quarter century, and call it a day (again). I can’t imagine anyone in attendance Friday would begrudge the musicians for making that decision.
Yet perhaps, this concert and this tour are not an end, but a beginning. It seems absurd to yearn for any new music, or additional concerts beyond this run. If this is all we get, it is certainly plenty. Friday’s performance was a deeply satisfying gift. However, for a band that said it would never happen again, it seems premature to surrender hope entirely.

A Soul Coughing performance roars.

A Soul Coughing performance swings.

A Soul Coughing performance enthralls.