Soul Coughing, "Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago"
While they usually got labeled as an alt-rock band, the best description anyone ever gave of Soul Coughing was that they were a jazz band. Which about sizes it up, funkified grooves or not.
There was also a strange paranoid vibe in so much of their stuff that was sort of inescapable and buried at the same time. The same sort of claustrophobic trapped-in-your-basement funk that Talking Heads and Gary Numan had pioneered once upon a time. Soul Coughing contributed songs to both of the X-Files companion albums and were possibly the artist or band best-suited to that whole reactionary cutting-edge setting, that futuristic teetering on the millennial, phone back to the Birchers and science fiction cults (e.g. Dianetics, the Atheriusians) of the 1950s cocktail Chris Carter mixed so damn well for a few seasons in the '90s. You may have tinfoil over all the windows but at least you're shaking your booty in the safe room. Good stuff, yes.
There was also a strange paranoid vibe in so much of their stuff that was sort of inescapable and buried at the same time. The same sort of claustrophobic trapped-in-your-basement funk that Talking Heads and Gary Numan had pioneered once upon a time. Soul Coughing contributed songs to both of the X-Files companion albums and were possibly the artist or band best-suited to that whole reactionary cutting-edge setting, that futuristic teetering on the millennial, phone back to the Birchers and science fiction cults (e.g. Dianetics, the Atheriusians) of the 1950s cocktail Chris Carter mixed so damn well for a few seasons in the '90s. You may have tinfoil over all the windows but at least you're shaking your booty in the safe room. Good stuff, yes.
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