On Tuesday, Mike Doughty, the guitarist from the late ‘90s band Soul Coughing, released his new studio album that features 13 songs re-imagined from the former band’s catalog.

To be fair, I had never heard of Mike Doughty or his former band before being handed a copy of this new CD, so I’d like to think that my review lacks substantial personal bias towards an artist I have never heard before.

As I listened deeper into the musical career of Doughty, I actually came to question a great deal about his intentions and execution of this most recent album.

What initially sparked my doubts was his decision to “re-imagine” and re-record songs that he has not only publicly admitted to hating in his 2012 memoir “The Book of Drugs,” but refused to play throughout years of his solo career out of disrespect and ill-feelings toward his former band members.

Hypocrisy aside, I am not sure Doughty himself was particularly confident in the idea of the new recording, as he set up the album to become a reality only through a crowd funding effort on the Internet.

Not to say there was a shortage of die-hard fan donations — his crowd funding campaign exceeded its mark considerably — but to me it just sounds like he didn’t want to take a risk putting something out that people were not going to like.

While some may or may not view this as a confidence issue, I had distaste for his most recent work primarily because it lacks the raw, unpolished edge that made his music creative and unpredictable in the first place.

Take the song “Super Bon Bon.” In the new version, Doughty’s songwriting seems to struggle to become the focal point of the song. The bass line, heavy samples and programmed drum beats blend together to make up a repetitive and uninteresting background for him to talk over. I would argue that in the older version, the interplay between his vocals and the band are what make the track strange and interesting to listen to.

In Soul Coughing, his vocals were able to lend to the creativity of the band as a whole. He allowed his voice to act as another instrument, finding its own unique spot within the band’s sound.

In his remake, the supporting band, not made up of any original Soul Coughing members (or even a real drummer for that matter), seems to play behind Doughty. While he might disagree, I believe this forces his lyrics to unnaturally become the most important part of almost every song, when they just aren’t.

Maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was the raw talent of his three former band-mates that created the utterly unique and experimental sound that I find in Soul Coughing. Take your pick, but neither one has made any contributions to this newest album.

Unfortunately for us, Doughty’s newest album (merely given the track listings in a comma-less series for the title) doesn’t feature any of the “deep slacker jazz” that Soul Coughing made popular. Unfortunately for

everyone, Doughty decided to “streamline” the old songs, making them as he had “initially intended.”

I come from a background of improvisational music, both listening and playing. Musical composition, as well as songwriting, requires powerful inspiration that is specific to both a time and a place. The Mike Doughty of Soul Coughing wrote those songs and performed them the way he did because of inspiration specific to that time in his life, specific to who he was when he wrote them.

While it is fair to consider that Doughty might be eager to create something new and fresh now thst he is clean of the substances that blurred his Soul Coughing days, he is a different person, a different artist entirely. I believe he has done these songs a greater injustice by trying to rid them of their raw, strange and sometimes dark auras that attracted listeners.

The songs on his new album are even less intricate than before and lack, in my opinion, any insightful differentiation on the instrumentation from the originals. Some are more upbeat than their old versions like the colorful “Tears of Wichita,” which I think lends to his attempts at making the songs “more hearable.”

I respect Doughty’s decision to continue to include a standup bassist within the mix, as I have a profound respect for anyone that can actually play a real physical instrument these days.

Overall, I found the album to feature the kinds of easy to follow, repetitive, programmable “club banger” beats that seem to be grabbing everyone’s attention presently through electronic music. I understand this new

sound may cater to more listeners, but I find it dramatically less appealing and especially less interesting, musically speaking.

His voice becomes monotonous; straying far away from the unpredictable and poetically lucid spoken-word style of singing he gave birth to in Soul Coughing.

In conclusion, I find it hard to believe that this album has more to do with his initial intentions regarding these songs and less about making money. Fans can even purchase the guitars used in the recordings.

My advice for Doughty and any other artists attempting a similar remake album: reinvent yourself through new material. Go above and beyond just revisiting a bunch of old songs you have refused to play for years out of some twisted spite.

In a strange way, Doughty has shown us that he is already quite capable of such reinvention. After the band broke up in 2000, Doughty took to the road in a rental car doing solo acoustic shows around the country and selling CDs. He was able to create a following independent of that which he made with the band that he attributes with so much of the darkness in his life.

Overall, I think it is unfortunate that he did not take this opportunity to come up with entirely new musical ideas influenced by the power of his present sobriety. For now, I will continue to enjoy and explore the older, weirder versions of these Soul Coughing songs.

Over the next few months, Doughty will be making a 32-stop Fall Tour promoting the new album, with none in Nebraska.