SUBTLE: Making Art That Sticks To Your Guts

By Kyle Lemmon

Photos by Alicia J. Rose

If you amble into Adam “Doseone” Drucker’s Oakland apartment, you’ll encounter his cheerful 10-year-old cat, Purple. You may even notice the Subtle frontman’s massive cardboard cutout of Garfield for his Dada-inspired YouTube cartoon, NOTgarfield. But one of his current most-valued belongings would have to be his old Dylan Thomas records. Drucker gushes over the famous poet, “Dylan is my co-pilot at all altitudes — or lack thereof.”

Like Thomas’ iconic short poem on death, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” Subtle realized its tremulous mortality after going through the hellish ordeal of a van crash (which left keyboardist/synth-player Dax Pierson a quadriplegic), a devastating robbery in Barcelona and the wobbly reception of its 2006 major label debut for Astralwerks, For Hero: For Fool. Despite all this, Doseone and the rest of the Subtle crew — Jeffrey “Jel” Logan (sampler, drum machine), Jordan Dalrymple (drums, guitar, synth, vocals), Marty Dowers (sax, flute, bass clarinet, synth) and Alexander Kort (cello, bass) — seem to take refuge and mystical guidance in the inspirational words of the Welsh poet and awaken their urgency to live life at full tilt.

Drucker finds the band’s difficult past as a stentorian call to amplify his art. “When you get in a life-threatening experience like that, and Dax having to sacrifice so much, it makes you want to triple down on the art and make it even more cool and more layered and more ‘not to be fucked with’ in record heaven,” he says. “Unfortunately, it can be explained in a lot of slogan and fortune cookie ways as to why we kept going. Dax galvanized everything and made us a family and not a cluster of people attempting something; Dax went down for what he loved and it made it impossible to play that down.”

The band’s decision to go for broke manifests itself on new album ExitingARM’s surrealistic explosion of music, art, poetry and ingenious online marketing. Released last month on the U.K.-based indie Lex Records, the album’s intricate mythology (vigilantly crafted by Doseone) lends fantastical allegories with touches of humor, non-sequiturs and the sextet’s usual collaborative aestheticism.

Subtle hopes to help break the modern listener’s over-saturated apathy with the continuation of alternative marketing stratagems that it started with its last album. Where some record labels’ obvious ploys for consumers in a download age manifest themselves as bonus tracks and limited editions, Subtle tries a different approach. The LP release of For Hero: For Fool, for instance, folds out into a game that mirrors Mouse Trap. Now Subtle provides a written and visual companion to ExitingARM, “The Ought Almanac of Amassed Fact Vol. I,” and hopes its adventurous fans will search through the explosion of recorded poetry and dreamlike graphic novel art on www.exitingarm.com.

Those same adventurous fans get worked into a fervor by Subtle’s vivid live performance. Equal parts musical spectacle and outlandish comedy routine, Doseone creeps across the stage embodying the music. “I think that is how all our songs culminate live,” he says. “It feels like a spectacle because we make the songs in parts so it is a bit more arty. Our live show is not a lesser version of the recording, it’s a completely different one with the bones showing.”

Offstage, the impetus behind ExitingARM (the final installment in the three-part story of fictional antihero Hour Hero Yes) stems from Drucker coming across the criminally underrated Bob Kaufman’s Abomunist Manifesto when he was looking to write his own poetry book/CD. Drucker put Kaufman’s surrealistic vision together with striking phrases found in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry book The Living Torch, and the beginnings of ExitingARM came into fruition.

Despite its esoteric inspirations, ExitingARM is arguably one of Subtle’s most accessible efforts. Doseone notes that the band used “Mercury Craze,” the overwhelming fan and personal favorite off its last album, as a blueprint for these new songs. And in a shrewd self-reference on ExitingARM, the protagonist Yes starts creating a 20,000-word almanac in secret as a sort of diary. “Yes is then told by these two Ungodz of this new world, Dr. Moonorgun and Reverend Pitman, to create these perfect pop songs from the stuff in the almanac,” explains Drucker. “These two Ungodz represent everything that is rounding [artistic individualism] off in the universe — the doctor and the deacon.”

Further, Subtle attempts to carve out new pop motifs on ExitingARM as a veritable kiss-off to all the critics that thought the band couldn’t create a pop album. “More than new musical motifs, we brought new rules of thumb by which to groom our improvised high points and sort of off-eyed searching for a modern song tempo and short attention span-friendly appropriation of our ‘straight dope,’ for lack of a better term,” says Drucker. Despite the niggling tags of being “divisive” or “cerebral,” Subtle inserts a lot of connotative humor and pathos into its ghost-in-the-machine pop, satirizing Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing” on the last line of “The No,” and continuing its seventh song tradition of biting pop princess detritus by aping Fergie’s “My Humps” on “Unlikely Rock Shock.”

Like the albums that came before it, Subtle recorded ExitingARM itself. “It was mixed by Jay Pellicci but at New, Improved Recordings in Oakland. We used tape echo and other analog components — when we record at home, it’s true analog. So again, we are a hybrid of digital compression and actual analog breadth,” Drucker says. Despite his condition, Pierson raps, programs and plays keyboard and autoharp on the album with the aid of Ableton Live.

The album blazes a whiplash pace through hip-hop/proggy Krautrock propulsion (“Unlikely Rock Shock”), the glitch of IDM bliss-out (“Day Dangerous”) and flute industrial jungle jams (“Gonebones”). The speed-rapping beats that crash into Pierson’s escalating octaves on the ambient outré to “Providence” seem to wrap the story up.

“We put so much into this album and I’m a little numb to the wind at points,” says Drucker. “We’re not a very ‘now’ band; we don’t include many contemporary things, hence the efforts to make something timeless by not using songs with ‘I’ in them — no break-up songs. We try to make music that sticks to your guts.”

www.subtle6.com