El Oso by Soul Coughing

El Oso, Spanish for "the bear", is Soul Coughing's third album, released by Slash and Warner Bros. on September 29, 1998, and it's the New York band at its most slippery. Tchad Blake produced it, and he leaves plenty of room for the strange machinery: Mark Degli Antoni's samples and keyboards fizzing and looping, Sebastian Steinberg's double bass prowling underneath, Yuval Gabay locking the beats into something between jazz and hip-hop.

Out front, Mike Doughty rattles off his stream-of-consciousness verse like a beat poet who wandered into a DJ booth, a sound he liked to call deep slacker jazz. "Circles", with its loping, sing-song groove, is the one the countdowns latched on to, and critics were generally warm to the whole record.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.