Soul Coughing – Madison theater, Covington, KY
oul Coughing played their first concert in 1992 and their last show (prior to last year's reunion) in 2000. Over those eight years, the band released only three studio albums and eight singles, so when you go to a Soul Coughing show, you more or less know what you’re going to hear. On December 8, the band brought the Soul Coughing Still Loves You tour to the Madison Theater in Covington, KY and delivered an enthusiastic, sharply performed “best of” set. I’d call it a “greatest hits” show, except their commercial success never quite matched the brilliance of their music—only three of those singles ever charted.
The 22-song set pulled from every album, and each track was clearly someone’s favorite, judging from the waves of recognition rolling through the full—if not completely packed—Greater Cincinnati venue. For the most part, the band stayed close to the original recordings. A few songs were a bit more up tempo, a couple slightly slower, but far less rearranged than one might expect, given the remix album the band released in November.
All four original members took the stage: Mike Doughty on vocals and guitar, Mark degli Antoni on keyboard sampler, Sebastian Steinberg on bass, and Yuval Gabay on drums. For a group that hadn’t played together in over 20 years before last year, they sounded tight and in sync—if not always fully aligned with the printed set list, a recurring onstage joke as one member or another accidentally launched into a song prematurely. Each musician has continued honing their craft in post–Soul Coughing projects, and it showed.
They played with the enthusiasm of much younger men (all except Doughty are now in their 60s, and he’s not far behind at 55), and they genuinely seemed to enjoy themselves. Doughty’s vocals were pitch-perfect, and once his guitar made its first appearance—three songs into the set—it was consistently on point. As a frontman, he was warm and engaging, even pulling the audience into a couple of call-and-response moments. Steinberg, the band’s eldest member, acted as a kind of secondary frontman: joking about his age, the mistakes it supposedly entitled him to make, and delivering a mid-set PSA for Punk Rock Saves Lives because “it’s been a tough year” and many people need help. Gabay, with a full drum kit at his disposal, relied mainly on his snare, cymbal, and hi-hat, but his timing remained stopwatch-precise. Degli Antoni, mostly hidden behind his gear, kept his samples prominently at the forefront of the sound.
Soul Coughing was very much a product of its time. I’ve often thought of them as the late- century junk drawer of the ’90s alternative scene: bits and pieces of genres assembled into something that could only have existed then. In ’92, college radio had morphed into “alternative,” dominated by grunge, jangly pop-rock, lo-fi indie, and post-punk new-wave dance music. But there was still space for the bands that didn’t quite fit: Beck, Morphine, Eels, the ’90s Beastie Boys—and Soul Coughing. Soul Coughing blended jazz, rock, blues, big band, pop, early rap, proto-EDM, spoken-word beat poetry, and were early adopters of sampling outside hip-hop. Musically, they were a mixed bag of past and future.
Their lyrics, too, were of their era—crammed with pop-culture nuggets from the shared media ecosystem of ’70s and ’80s kids: the same movies, TV shows, commercials, books, and radio hits. Maybe that’s why the crowd skewed older, mostly the same age or just slightly younger than the band. With few exceptions, these were people who experienced each album in real time, who saw the band in concert pre-breakup, and who’ve had these songs in their lives for nearly three decades. The absence of younger listeners suggests either their parents were greedy and kept Soul Coughing to themselves—or the references and textures of ’90s pop culture just didn’t translate cleanly into the 21st century.
But for those of us who were there, this show was everything we remembered. Soul Coughing still loves us—and we still love them.
FULL GALLERY
Musician, concert photographer, writer, podcast host and founder of The Hot Mic Music Magazine.
