The End of Silence, for now.

If you've wondered where I've hung my be-spectacled head lately, its been on Mog ,
an online music community made up of ex music journalistas who now rabbit on about music like their lives depend on it, which, in a way it does.

This review of Mike Doughty's appalling Golden Delicious originally appeared on MOG's main page and under the following URL.

http://mog.com/Kronski/blog_post/144139

Mike Doughty, journeyman, skeletal poet, former member of Soul Coughing.

More on that journey later, but for now let me say how much the failure of his latest record, Golden Delicious, released on Dave Matthews’s ATO record label, stems from the first impression gained when we look at his arched eyebrow and that sepia toned shot of him and a golden delicious apple.

His MySpace caption says of Golden Delicious, “An Apple, an Album.”

Why Golden Delicious? Why an album named after a fucking apple?

"Drinking in My Dreams," a track from the sessions of his previous album (the comparably wonderful Haughty Melodic), implies that a former alcoholic can still feel his phantom limb beating underneath the stained sheets of what can surely be a golden delicious morning. So maybe he’s been sober for awhile, and with this record, this arrival of success — for all of Dave Matthews' fans will find a lot to like here, such as the overly repetitive melodies — means the arrival of eloquent set pieces that often take a turn for the worse. Such as when Doughty, midway through "I Just Want the Girl in the Blue Dress to Keep on Dancing," abandons the melody and goes straight for the mind-numbing choruses.

What starts out as a needed diversion, what could have been an opportunity to explore his inner longings, instead becomes what is wrong with every track on this record. Instead of getting to the root of his demons, or railing against Los Angeles, he instead finds a sing-song sound with which to sledgehammer the very promising melody into the listener’s head in the worst way possible.

"Da domb da domb dom dom, da domb da domb dom. Da domb da domb dom dom, da domb da domb dom."

Why does a man who published a book of poetry, Slanky, beloved of the New York Times, a participant in that grand old literary experiment known as McSweeney’s (one of Doughty’s earlier songs appeared on a compilation that accompanied said literary journal), a man with such a great capacity for language ... do this to himself?

Perhaps Doughty is just another accomplished artist who finally realized that it’s easier to pump sunshine and cliché through the skeletons of his troubled past then to use these same skeletons to explore further the depths of his demons. I liked him a lot better when he built up and got lost in the canvas he strung around the beats back in his Soul Coughing Days.

For New Yorker Mike Doughty, oddly enough, Los Angeles was his muse, his foil. The sick pock-marked city, with its boils and ills and fever-dreams, became a canvas, something to lie next to, a place to be polluted by, a place for him to rail against. Los Angeles was a live-in metaphor that he explored both on Soul Coughing records and on "No Peace, Los Angeles" on his solo debut, Skittish. And while stability, sobriety and life on an even keel is most certainly preferable to an unstable life pitted against the demon cellar of the biggest cities on either coast, it most certainly does not make for a very compelling listen here.

Maybe I am not the intended listener for Golden Delicious, and who am I to deny the process by which self-respecting artists turn into coffee-shop schlock? For I can see the display now, Mike and the golden delicious apple, advertising at a nationwide coffee chain near you, placed strategically right next to piles of overpriced fair trade Guatemalan coffee beans. Hey, at least he’s happy.

It's an evolution of sorts for Doughty, then, from back in the days of the first Soul Coughing record, Ruby Vroom; the recording and eventual blooming of solo debut Skittish; through to the end of Soul Coughing with El Oso; the well-elaborated-upon melodies of his solo breakthrough, the far superior Haughty Melodic; and now this supposed Golden Delicious, this blatant grab at fame.

Perhaps I can offer a cruel yet effective solution to Doughty. Maybe he should take his own advice, as he does in one track, and “put on the sauce/ put it on the sauce” — that is, go back to drinking, and repeat it as often as these choruses do on Golden Delicious.

The truly sad thing is how this once-talented dynamo sells out in such an unspectacular fashion. I would rather see him in a belly shirt, shaking his ass on stage in a Gap ad then to let his music fall so flat, so fast. For all of its overcookedness, Golden Delicious leaves us with the impression of a blatant and intentional leap off of the cliff of genuine artistry.