I've written about Soul Coughing before, but mostly to damn them with faded faint praise, which is unfortunate because that makes me feel disappointed in myself. The last couple of days I've been listening to their debut album, Ruby Vroom, repeatedly and in the state that I've been lately the strange mood and feel it possesses has wrapped me up in a comfortably eerie vibe, like a comforter made out of ravens and Gorey drawings (the real weird ones like the The Curious Sofa).

The other thing is that someone in the band is fiercely creative in a really dark/strange way that isn't prevalent on any of their other albums. This song might be the best example of that: the mood of the whole song is just strange in the first place, with Doughty's near spoken word absurd tale of a car murderer eventually being killed by one of his victims, but then it's made even weirder by employing a variety of samples and sound effects to elicit different, strange moods in you.

People talk, rap, or sing out of radios at volumes in the background that make them impossible to understand. Bits of film & cartoon scores cut in seemingly at random, usually just as quick stabs. Some have to be sound effects from horror movies. It's all designed to enhance the groove of the song but also make you feel kind of uncomfortable---something Spoon did on their album from last year but used odd timing to do it. Soul Coughing builds a chorus hook out of the ghostly snippets of reversed syllables! What is that? Who even thinks of that? Whatever these guys were smoking when they made all this music, I want to smoke it.

I want to live it, and breathe it. This song is some of the smoothest, most deeply intriguing shit I've heard, and I think it's pretty amazing that while I've been listening to this album for the last fourteen years at least, I've never been so transfixed by this specific song. That's kind of the beauty of good music: you can return to it when you're older, different, and you'll hear new things in it. Things you weren't able or willing to hear before. It's like finding new, exciting music to love living inside music you thought you already knew and loved.

It makes me wish bands could get second chances. It's an unrealistic fantasy, but I like to imagine some day there could be a random resurgence of popularity for an older defunct band I love. Imagine if this post inspired a sudden massive surge in people buying this album? Suddenly everyone sounds like me: "Ruby Vroom is a work of creative genius, it's too bad the major label system eventually made them turn more poppy & commercial, and apparently sucked away the soul of M. Doughty." Could be amazing.

I hope you really listen to this song.

Also, note that this album came out on a major label. Can you imagine hearing anything this interesting release on a major label anymore? This would be an acclaimed indie album if it came out these days, if it even came out at all in the first place. Something to think about. Before the internet a band like this probably needed the labels to survive, and we should thank them for that. Now a days, maybe Soul Coughing could have made it (and then some) if the internet had its back.

I just don't know what some bands are thinking sometimes. Listen to this song. It's a good song, it makes me feel things, but for some reason I can't listen to it turned up much past a hair on the dial, because they've drenched the song in so much bright white noise that it's actually painful to listen to.

I guess that's just their shtick. Wikipedia says they're "lofi" and record their albums to cassette tape. Sounds to me that after they record their album to cassette they then throw the cassette in the street and run over it repeatedly with their fixies, shouting all the while about how fucking novel they are. The sad thing is that there were other people at the time, standing around, cheering them on, and telling them that stuff like this was pleasing to hear.

If that isn't proof that occasionally celebrated music trends are completely bullshit and awful, I don't know what is. It's like the art world up in this shit.

Three years after this album came out, Times New Viking took to a studio for the first time, recording Dancer Acquired---which I am pretty sure is a Killers reference---which still kind of sounds like ass. Instead of waves of static it's bathed in a near-1970's vibe, with a nice warm buzzy feel to it, the way I wish every album was still recorded. Unfortunately it appears all that static of the prior albums was masking the fact that they play and sing sloppily, like they're at that point of late night drunkenness when you're just tired and don't want to do a fucking thing but for some reason you're recording an album???. Seriously.

Anyway, I guess you could say I'm saying this band sucks. If you like them, you're welcome.

I'm not really sure how to feel about this album.

On one hand, I love the sing-a-longs (think if Pavement was influenced by Akron/Family) , and I love how crazy creative the songs get. This sounds like a band playing at full tilt, but the good kind where the car never really crashes, it just bounces joyfully back and forth between the parked cars as it careens down the street. The energy is infectious. I don't even know if I liked the album the first time I listened to it, but I knew that when it was over I longed for that energy, so I listened to it again.

Then on the other, I don't know why the mix is so bright on this whole album. It's like someone in the band was like "Everything will sound awesome if you make it so that ears bleed if you ever turn up this album as loud as it should rightfully be played!". The style of music occasionally gets to where it makes me feel a little embarrassed, for reasons unknown, but that just makes it a guilty pleasure, and guilty ones are always more fun. My girlfriend says they sound Harvey Danger, but I don't agree with that except that they are definitely one of the more bright sounding bands as well.

I waffled back and forth on what song to post. At first it was going to be "Floated Down and Flew Around" because I just love the melody of that one. The frantic pace of the song with the group singing really makes me tap my foot. However, that song isn't really a good example of their bigger numbers, and the "Woo!" kind of annoys me, so it probably isn't a good example.

Last.FM says their top track is "Stay That Way" but I didn't want to post that one because it's the first track on the album and it just doesn't seem right, so I thought about "Black Market Pandas", the second song. After the almost normal indie-rock feel of the first track, the bouncy swagger of "Pandas" is almost like a backhand. It's a nice combo, leaving you wondering what other surprises the album has in store, but there's no big group vocal in it. It could make you think they're just some funky weird band loved by high school kids (for some reason this song reminds me of high school? Why?), so not that one.

"Perched on a Porch" is such an emo song, posting it seems like it'd be doing a worse crime to your first impression of the band. This is an album that contains so many different directions that it's practically impossible to just pick one song and say, "Here! Listen to this!" and expect you to understand how interesting and diverse the full album is. I'm pretty sure that's a compliment. I'll let the band lead off the album like they do on the record, so that's why you've got the first song, "Stay That Way".

Look at how much time you've wasted.

The Dodos, or I guess just Dodos now but I'll ignore that, dupe us for a second. No Color opener "Black Night" is very nearly a return to form, sounding jangly and lively and even if it's rare there are the reverbator-soaked yelps from Visiter, and it's exciting and Meric Long's voice seems to just be getting smoother with experience. My run-on should tell you that if you haven't hit that play button up there, you should. It's a great and fun song, and after the ultimately forgettable frumpy slump of their last album it's refreshing.

Even the couple of tracks after it are good as well, playing with those quirky loudQUIETloud dynamics. Long's melodies are in general much smoother than anything on Visiter, a lot of the manic energy from that album is still somewhat absent, replaced with an almost laid back and comfortable vibe. "Sleep" is another obvious highlight, with an oddly metered chorus eventually accompanied by strings that make it oddly beautiful and powerful---especially when the near-Beatles style breakdown/freakout kicks in at the end.

But then the album gets kind of boring. Maybe it's the same problem that last album that shall not be named had, where everything just sounds too similar. I wonder why that is? I don't know enough about music to even begin to guess, which is unfortunate 'cause I'd love to be like, "They're all in the same key!" or "His melodies are too similar because he relies on the same modes!" or something that sounds intelligent. Maybe it's just that all the songs are too noisy now. Visiter was an album full of moments of silence, where you could practically feel the emptiness of the room these two lone guys were playing in. That feeling is now gone, and with it much of the charm.

A lot of Visiter was great because of how brave and experimental it was. There hasn't been another "Walking" from The Dodos. Long's voice hasn't soared like that on an album since, and that's sad. That ridiculous but charming "Undeclared" song exists in no other forms. The weird twangy solo riffs of "Jody". Their songs were full of randomness, you could never really be sure exactly where they'd go next. They should take a page from Rilo Kiley, how Blake Sennett always has a funny-odd little track on each album, and make sure they touch on certain quirk cornerstone left-hooks every album. On No Color every song seems to sound a bit like the next. Maybe it'll grow on me over time, but I don't know if I'll try to let it.

"Black Night", great song though!

I have this funny reaction to garage rock. If it's loud and noisy enough, it's a bit like it punches me right in the face. It forces me to take notice, and I become infatuated with it for a little bit until I make myself sick of it by overplaying it. This is what happened between me and White Denim's Fits. I just listened to it over and over and over, which I actually attest to a year ago (a working search function is awesome), and I think I'm on the cusp of doing it with this Warm Slime album by Thee Oh Sees.

Thee Oh Sees, who aren't from OC but San Fransisco. I actually discovered this band because of a paid iPad app called Discovr, which I should probably review for my other site. Discovr shows you nifty little related band balloons, similar to a Last.FM visualizer I remember using years ago, but their database of artists seems to be really good---Last.FM has never recommended Thee Oh Sees to me, so that right there makes me think Discovr is worth the money.

With that out of the way... Thee Oh Sees have a sound that I'd place somewhere between The Strange Boys and Archie Bronson Outfit's last album. On "Warm Slime" (the title track) they start off on the precipice of noise rock and then dial it down into a slow burn groove, which then they stretch out for about 10 minutes using basically all the same techniques "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" did---I wouldn't be surprised if that was the band's inspiration. It gets quiet, it gets loud, there's whistling at some point, cuts down to just bass and vocal, tempo changes, etc. It's all there and, dare I say it, it's totally awesome. It's so... organic! You can hear that when the drummer picks the tempo up that the guitarists take a second to catch up. This is a band playing live! And they're tearing it up!

Man, it's too bad that song is 13 minutes, because otherwise I'd post it. Instead you get track two, "I Was Denied", which is their least noisy and most straight forward song on the album. It sounds a bit like a lot of different songs from the 70's, and I guess that's a solid compliment. The album as a whole varies between experimental/noisy and solid jams/grooves that make for great hooks. It's only the last song that makes my head throb a little bit. "Warm Slime" itself is the star of the show, and probably worth the price of admission just by itself.