When confronted with groups like Subtle, music critics fret. We have a deeply ingrained need to categorize everything we hear, to (we hope) slap a clever term on a style of music, give it a pat on the back, send it out into the public consciousness, and finally file it away in our memory banks for future use. Artists like Subtle frustrate every attempt to place a concise descriptor on their sui generis sound. Yet they record for Lex Records, Warp's hiphop subsidiary.
Subtle are the ill, logical extension of cLOUDDEAD and Themselves. Both precursors inventively smudged hiphop's parameters, folding in elements of IDM, drone, shoegaze rock, astral jazz, avant-garde poetry, and psychedelia into geeky mutations of the art form P. Diddy built (kidding). The common thread running through all three units is Adam Doseone Drucker. Two Subtle members (drum-machine operator Jeff Jel Logan and keyboard/melodica player Dax Pierson) also compose Themselves. Alexander Kort (electric and acoustic cello and bass), Marty Dowers (woodwinds, synth), and Jordan Dalrymple (drums, guitar, sampler) round out Subtle's lineup.
Doseone is arguably the world's most distinctive MC, for better or worse (he has his detractors). He possesses the least macho voice in hiphop; it toggles between an exaggeratedly nasal bark and a fey, wispy falsetto. Tonal qualities aside, Dose has done the nearly unthinkable in hiphop circles: He's made rhyming irrelevant. His words are so captivating they don't need assonance, though sometimes they do cohere into recognizable rhyme schemes. Dose raps like a ballerina flits across a floor; his words elude literal meaning like a hiphop kid avoids tight pants. His lyrics spill out of his wired mind like an adenoidal auctioneer, evoking a speedy mishmash of Beat poetry, Surrealist exquisite corpse exercises, murky stream-of-consciousness reports, and frayed, fungi-fueled fantasies. "The way I hear writing and recording is like some exploding television program or a budget dream with special effects," Dose told me in an interview from 2003.
That method extends to Subtle. From 2002-2004, the six-piece issued four EPs named after the seasons, most of whose songs were collected on Earthsick. Their 2004 Lex debut album, A New White, refines the group's peculiar gumbo of psych and prog rock, pencil-necked funk, glitchy ambience, and fried, post-modern folk. You've not heard anything quite like it. DAVE SEGAL
Subtle play with Department of Eagles and Optimus Rhyme Sat Feb 19 at Chop Suey, 1325 E Madison St, 324-8000, 5:30 pm, all ages, $10 adv.
