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By: Dennis Cook
Gnomes have hijacked the beat, taken it deep into the ground and laid it on a "spreading pile of tired little suns." Glue drips from the craggy ceiling, and strewn at our feet are dirty cables and battle scarred circuit boards. This is a hidey-hole of ancient-futures, a lay low for pagan spacemen returned to find the Statue of Liberty buried up to her tits in the sand. It's the same fate for heroes and fools alike, and Subtle knows it.
In a Hollywood-set-style heaven
Beyond two floors of sky,
And another 5 of inner-most outer-space
Hang awake Darwin's bones,
Wheeled on a hook to the edge of a cumulous cloud
Peering down, just eating you up
And loving your nature to death
Not much in contemporary music strikes one as truly original. Most sounds, however enjoyable, have fairly easily obvious pedigrees. Not so with Subtle, who glide with blood churning hyperactivity, their omni-net catching bits of this and that, which they boil into the strangest, coolest jambalaya ever. You'd be hard pressed to find a more startlingly unique album than For Hero: For Fool (Lex/Astralwerks). Only their second full-length, it lifts one bodily and takes you places you've never been before. What greater gift has music to offer?
Fantastically gnarled, For Hero: For Fool also bumps in a feverishly captivating way. Cuts like "Midas Gutz" have the heady bounce of a club hit but the brains of those who profit off the glamorous life. In short, their mind-freeing, wildly associative explorations are ridiculously fun, too. "The Mercury Craze" is infectious as Britney's "Toxic," full of bomb ass falsetto, yummy philosophizing and a sweeping coda that might have been written by Bernard Herrmann . The opening quartet of tracks - an elongated dissertation on middleclass life and the monkeys who live it - is so thick with ideas, musical and otherwise, it'll take years for even dedicated listeners to unravel. Often, Subtle feels like an epic poem written by living computers, a flurry of ones and zeroes that add up if you've got the bandwidth to unravel them.
One hesitates to compare them to others but in broad strokes there's echoes of Kraftwerk, Master Ace, Soft Machine, Roxy Music, Sopwith Camel, Rakim, Konono No. 1, Kate Bush, Daniel Lanois and Einstürzende Neubauten. It's quite a list yet still only a gloss on the scope of their vision. And that's the heart of it – real vision. Fresh from a national tour opening for TV On The Radio, Subtle are relentless pioneers for warped truth and ugly beauty in music. They embrace it all, knowing as Kahlil Gibran once put it, the bowl of our happiness is carved out by our sorrow. The more fully we experience life, in all its facets, the richer the whole thing becomes. Subtle have sucked the marrow of things and regurgitated sharp cud that's bitter and bright on the tongue.
JamBase | California
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