A Slight Delay

Mike Doughty, Golden Delicious. ATO Records.

Anyone that’s been in “the business” long enough, whether it’s music, art, literature, or anything else creative, gets it sooner or later: someone’s going to tell them, either face to face or in print, that they liked them better when they [fill in the blank].  By that measure, Mike Doughty has arrived.

Golden Delicious doesn’t immediately sound like Soul Coughing, nor does it sound entirely like any of the singer’s previous solo efforts, Skittish/Rockity Roll, or even his “proper” ATO debut, Haughty Melodic. And for that, he’s taken a bit of a beating. Some of the critics, it seems, liked him better when he’d slipped his moorings/was still addicted to drugs/still sounded like the bastard stepchild of Roni Size and Billy Strayhorn.

Tough.

Yes, on the surface, this is a much sunnier album. It doesn’t have the drum n’ bass flourishes and bent atmospherics that characterized Soul Coughing, and it’s certainly more polished than his earlier solo offerings. And that, to my ears anyway, ain’t necessarily a bad thing.

The disc opens with “Fort Hood,” probably the first [only?] song that manages to reference the Iraq war, Young Jeezy, early Motown and Hair. Like so much of the rest of the album-and of Doughty’s work, for that matter-it’s deceptively sunny, its seemingly unruffled surface barely concealing the darker tone of the lyrics.

Speaking of lyrics, one thing to remember with Doughty is that the words, from the earliest days, are as much about sound as about sense. So songs like “I Just Want The Girl With the Blue Dress to Keep On Dancing” go from lopsided romanticism (”Your crooked nose is where it’s at”) to scat and back, the singing as much textural as textual. The same could just as easily be said about “Put It Down,” “I Wrote A Song About Your Car,” and the crooked funk of “More Bacon than the Pan Can Handle,” which makes about as much sense as the title would suggest, and sticks in your head just the same.

It’s the second half of the album that starts to build up steam… with a pair of downtempo tunes, no less. “I Got the Drop On You” wouldn’t be half as foreboding if it weren’t so understated; it would’ve sounded at home on Chris Whitley’s “Dirt Floor.” “Wednesday (No Se Apoye),” meantime, has a gentleness and depth that his previous work has only hinted at.

The disc’s only misstep is “27 Jennifers.” Not that it isn’t a good song, but this version’s not so different that it warranted being included for the second time in four albums. But when that’s the worst thing you can think to say about one of eleven tracks, I suppose that’s not a half-bad record. That isn’t to say that Mike Doughty will be everyone’s cup of tea. For all the accusations leveled against him for turning out a commercial piece of crap, Golden Delicious is just off-kilter enough to put off eardrums weaned on American Idol and its ilk.

But there’s something to be said for that. I think that artists-at least the ones who’re going to last, and maintain something like relevance while they’re around-grow and evolve. Sometimes that evolution takes both the artist, and his listener, places they don’t recognize, and/or weren’t expecting. That’s much less a sell-out than settling for an easy stasis that doesn’t place any demands on the musician, much less on his audience, is. This album isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s a sure step in the right direction.

Tags: Mike Doughty, reviews, Soul Coughing

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 11:24 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.