In Subtle bard Doseone’s alternate universe, Hour Hero Yes–a man with fiery hair and skin striped like a referee’s uniform–languishes. A sinister pair of powerful “Ungods” has enslaved Hour Hero Yes to exploit his musical talents, forcing him to produce perfectly saccharine pop songs that will encourage obedience in the listening public. But despite the Ungods’ attempts to brainwash Hour Hero Yes, he is ever aware of his capture, and embeds messages in his songs encouraging an uprising against the Ungods–whose true goal is to dispose of anything that contains meaning or beauty.
And that’s the abridged version of the tale. Welcome to the surreal labyrinth of Subtle front man Adam Drucker’s imagination.
Onstage, Drucker goes by Doseone; in his prose, he is Hour Hero Yes, a fictional metcaricature of the real-life Adam. “Hour Hero Yes is really this compilation of my best and worst,” he explains. “He’s me without the ‘I,’ without all my issues. It’s how I would be if I were a superhero, only dealing in these absolutes.”
Subtle’s new release, ExitingARM, will conclude Hour Hero Yes’ story, a trilogy that began with Subtle’s first full-length record (and first release on Oakland-based Lex Records), 2004’s A New White. Since then, a lot has changed. Multi-instrumentalist Dax Pierson is now a quadriplegic, the result of a tragic tour-van accident after the release of A New White. Reinventing the way he makes music, Pierson contributes to the records as before, but no longer tours with the band. If that weren’t enough, during the following For Hero: For Fool tour, a Barcelona van robbery required Doseone, who also functions as the band’s resident visual artist, to draw custom portraits of fans for money—something he says he actually enjoyed. Out of the ashes of that strife, though, Doseone and fellow Subtle musicians Pierson, Jeff “Jel” Logan, Jordan Dalrymple, Alexander Kort, and Marty Dowers have upped the creative ante once more.
ExitingARM, Doseone says, is meant to be an impossible-to-fast-forward “pop artifact” of the songs Hour Hero Yes creates as a slave for the Ungods. As Hour Hero Yes, Doseone obfuscates his true call to arms with rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness rhymes rife with abstractions; it requires concentration to understand what Doseone is saying without being swept astray by the hypnotic instrumentals. And sure, it’s easy to become enamored of Subtle’s heady aural pleasantries and artful production without even paying attention to Hour Hero Yes’ saga. But on ExitingARM as well as its predecessors, the cotton-candy coating is an artfully constructed device to simultaneously augment and distract from Doseone-as-Hour-Hero-Yes’ profound observations about the apathy choking our society.
In Hour Hero Yes’ world, that force of indifference is a phenomenon as real as climate change, and it is called the “Terrible Great Nothing Much.” “[It] is this sort of earth atmosphere congestion of angst and apathy in mankind,” Doseone explains. “It gathered like a second, dirty, human ozone with the CFCs that the human mind produces.” In fact the whole trilogy began, Doseone says, “as this description of something that I see in the great American mind at the merch booth, this absence within absence, and in myself as well. It became this greater umbrella for all this apathy in men personified.” The unspoken moral here, of course, is that creative minds should resist the temptation to stagnate in apathetic stasis. So after the dust settles from ExitingARM, Subtle fans should watch for the subsequent remix album, a Subtle tradition that began with A New White. So far, fellow electro-surrealists Black Moth Super Rainbow, Genghis Tron, and Trans Am are working on ExitingARM remixes; also in the works is a new album from Subtle side project Themselves.
Meanwhile, for fans who want to fully immerse themselves in Hour Hero Yes’ world until the remix drops, Doseone composed a 20,000-word almanac, available in online installments [www.ExitingARM.com] and in print form for the first 100 takers. All Subtle album lyrics, Doseone says, are derived from the almanac. “I did the lyrics last on this record, which is the first time I’d ever done that, so the songs would [already] be great, adorable structures, and then I would just pull out the almanac.” Ostensibly written by Hour Hero Yes in the third person, the almanac “is the Hour Hero Yes legacy,” Doseone says, “and all its prose is an allegory for our adventures in making music.”
Doseone says he chose the almanac format because “there’s no distinct timeline, and there’s no distinct perspective or writing style.” It’s also not necessary, he adds, to read an almanac in order, which is why the online version of the almanac encourages readers to click on various elements in a vast panoramic illustration. Like the board game that accompanied For Hero: For Fool, both the virtual and tactile almanac indicate a larger attempt to create not just an album, but a postmodern multimedia art installation—something Doseone hopes will lend a bit of physical permanence to Subtle. “To make a tangible object like that, to make a surreal artifact, is sort of touching down,” Doseone says. “Leaving behind something like that is also cool, because it is just a bit wilder than any jewel case can control.”
