mike doughty @ the cat’s cradle, originally uploaded by minervacat.

Mike Doughty — Sad Man Happy Man.  Out 10/6, ATO Records.

I held off on reviewing this because I knew that I was seeing Doughty on a Tuesday; what better day to talk about his new album than a day I’m going to see him?

Soul Coughing, like Built to Spill, was a crucial part of my sonic landscape in college, a band I flat-out adored, and the thing is: I love Doughty solo far, far more than I have ever loved Soul Coughing, and I have loved Soul Coughing a lot.  Which is why Sad Man Happy Man works so well for me.  It’s an album that plays as though the best parts (the acoustic guitar, the happy sounding sad songs) of the stripped-down Skittish, Doughty’s first solo offering, fused together with the best parts of the old Soul Coughing (the crazy spoken word stuff, the weird sounds and noise-turned-music).  And it works, because the Soul Coughing innovations pump a vitality into the acoustic guitar, and the solo Doughty influences tone down the weirder, less accessible parts of the Soul Coughing feel.

What you end up with is an album that manages to be logically and deeply intimate, about love, loss, and life, and that sounds just a little bit wild, just a little bit off the norm.  It’s both daring and familiar, and frankly, I like that in my music.  Sometimes Soul Coughing got a little too weird for me; there were parts of Golden Delicious I just couldn’t find anything to connect to in.  Skittish and Haughty Melodic both sometimes read like searching albums, trying to find the place where the music exists on its own, outside of the Soul Coughing baggage. Sad Man Happy Man avoids all those things, finding a middle ground of weirdness-in-normality or maybe normality-in-weirdness.  It’s absolutely kick ass.

[Mike Doughty — “How To Fuck A Republican”] 5MB, .mp3.

And I absolutely, absolutely can’t wait to see him tonight. But first: a nap.

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