Mike Doughty's transformation from mid-90s white-boy-rapping boho/jazzbo spoken-word vocalist for Soul Coughing to acoustic guitar-toting singer/songwriter has been a curious development. It's a little startling hearing the man who barked and onomatopoeia'ed songs like "Casiotone Nation" and "Uh Zoom Zip" now singing on Skittish, his first solo album, which was recorded in 1996, released with extremely minimal packaging through his web site in 1999, and finally re-released with the follow-up Rockity Roll by ATO Records this year.
But Doughty's soft-rock proclivities shouldn't especially surprise anyone: Ruby Vroom ended with the gentle "Janine", a duet with his answering machine that informs almost everything on Skittish. What is really curious, however, is hearing Doughty's reedy voice sound so much deeper and grainier; stripped of his jolting irony, he sounds not just sincere, but genuinely wounded and much older, even though the album was recorded almost eight years ago.
And there are others reasons this acoustic context is a little confounding: over three albums Soul Coughing worked a chaotic sampling aesthetic that played Doughty's half-spoken, half-scatted observations against a frenetic backdrop of funky drums, jazz bass, and Mark de Gli Antoni's samples, which sounded like another instrument altogether.
By contrast, Skittish-- minimally produced by Kramer-- is mostly Doughty playing acoustic guitar and singing more traditional songs that he claims the other members of Soul Coughing refused to entertain. On the whole, they are love songs and they convey edgier, more complex emotions than he was able to express with his former band. Skittish begins with "The Only Answer", about meeting a new lover and all the excitement that comes with a new relationship. Doughty reveals his hopefulness in his snappy cover of Mary J. Blige's "Real Love" and expresses reservations in "Shunned + Falsified". The progression from track 1 to track 12 has the arc of a narrative, which makes "Rising Sign", the final track, all the more powerful, especially when Doughty sings "I resent the way you make me like myself." That statement sounds especially hard-won, and Skittish possesses the organic perfection of an album that needed desperately to be made, as if Doughty couldn't keep the songs inside anymore. They burble out freely and fully, and despite the minor flourishes of orchestra and organ on "No Peace, Los Angeles" and the bass rhythms on "Looks," the overall effect remains elemental, unadorned, solitary.
It's an aesthetic that he could not-- and apparently had no desire to-- maintain. Released through his web site in 2003, Rockity Roll dresses up similar, but lesser, songs in dinky keyboards and drum machines, and yet, for everything he adds, this mini-album seems to lose something. It sounds neither as immediate nor as fascinating as its predecessor, which is a comparative criticism but still reflects on Rockity Roll itself. To an extent, these six songs live and die with Pat Dillett's crisp, but often textureless, production: "Ways + Means" employs the same bouncy rhythms as "Circles" from Soul Coughing's slick swan song El Oso, and "27 Jennifers" sounds merely clever, its romantic sentiment lost among the drums and keyboards. But "Down on the River by the Sugar Plant" resonates with its frosty, noir-ish atmosphere and Doughty's precisely evocative lyrics about street merchants and heavy earrings, and "40 Grand in the Hole" offers an affecting-- and somewhat uncomfortable-- assessment of Doughty's financial, creative, and drug problems.
To tempt diehard fans who purchased both albums directly from Doughty's web site or merchandise table-- and who very likely bought the live disk he's selling now-- ATO has appended five bonus tracks to Rockity Roll. The two live cuts were culled from his Bonnaroo appearance, but neither adds much to its original. The studio version of "Move On", from The Future Soundtrack of America compilation, was one of that collection's and this year's best and most measured protest songs, if only for professing simultaneous love for and exasperation with America. But this stage version loses the walking rhythm that made the original sound so neighborly, as if Doughty had written and recorded it while strolling through the boroughs. And that seems to be the key to Doughty's charms as a solo musician: as these two releases make clear, he is at his best when he's at his most unassuming, when it sounds like he just picked up his guitar and sang whatever came to mind.
