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.

Over the years my fandom of Soul Coughing has faded slowly. There are a few songs of theirs that I still enjoy immensely, but it's their weird songs like this one and Bus to Beelzebub. Part of it, I think, has to do with how absolutely neutered and commercially polished Mike Doughty's solo work is (specifically his desperately plea for an adult contemporary pop hit [or something] with Looking at the World from the Bottom of a Well, but who am I to judge?), which somehow retcons my taste for Soul Coughing into a guilty pleasure. Sometimes when they come on in my car while other people are in it, I feel bad for them.

But I always turn this song up. This is the ultimate Los Angeles song, there is none better. When you're up on a late night somewhere within Los Angeles, and I mean actually in the city, and it's five in the morning, this is what it feels like. It's tired, repetitive, but it's also frantic and wonderful, you feel like you are everywhere anyone would want to be, but everyone is already there, or they've already left, but you're alone. You almost feel like a king, briefly, but it wanes. Then you're just alone there in the car, and either there's someone on the radio talking about something, or there's this song shouting at you, and even if you're with other people you're alone because at five a.m. no one is really there anymore.

I was actually in Los Angeles at 5:00 AM once and this song came on.

I'm pretty sure I was driving home from this girl's 4k/mo apartment off of Hollywood, which is pretty Los Angeles of me, if you ask me. That girl was a total bitch, which was pretty Los Angeles of her as well. I'm pretty sure it was about a month or two later that she invited (booty-called?) me over, just to tell me that my hair was too long and that she wouldn't fuck me with long hair. I drove 40 goddamn minutes to Encino, just to turn around and drive it back.

Bitches.

Amazon Note: Unfortunately AmazonMP3 does not seem to offer anything but live Soul Coughing bootlegs. Thusly, I link to their Best Of on AmazonPhysicalMedia.