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Rating:
The gift of synthesis is acquired through experience. It is with this warning that I set out to write my second un-review. But...but...the singer raps!? Long sentences?!...Endless enjambments?!...A unique piece to listen to in one breath?! And how do you manage to be succinct with this.
"For Hero: For Fool" (2006 @ Lex Records) is the second effort by the Oakland collective born from the twisted mind of the ex-cLOUDDEAD-ex-Themselves-ex-a-bit-of-everything Dose One (damn, if it weren't blasphemy, I'd compare him to Mike Patton for his countless collaborations, including notable ones with BoomBip "Circle" [2002 @ Mush] and with Notwist "13 & God" [2005 @ Anticon]).
A theater but not a puppet show. The scenic representation is combined with one of the most incomprehensible streams of consciousness ever birthed by a semi-human mind (an impression confirmed by their Live performances, absolutely dramatic, recited). The first Subtle work had pleasantly impressed, but it seemed like a less erratic version of Ten by cLOUDDEAD (read the excellent review). Here the guys take their own path, they take off running. Fast... no, lightning fast! It's impossible to pin down the tracks of this work which approaches many genres but never fully embraces them, mocking them.
Electronic or acoustic, sampled or played, spoken or sung, the music of Subtle hits hard...in the stomach...difficult to digest immediately.
"There were a carrot and a monkey... both on stage", the beginning of the beginnings. The pamphlet of the show. Silence in the hall, Subtle takes care of the noise. The rhythm section, very tight, sometimes can't keep up with the hyper-fast tongue of Dose One who uses various tricks to play all the actors in the show in a Petrolian chameleonism. From the fake joy and carefreeness of the beginning, it quickly descends into more uncomfortable terrains. The initial track is composed of 4 pieces fused together.
"A Tale of Apes I" and "A Tale of Apes II" are like Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde on acid and at a rave. Disco Trash.
"Middleclass Stomp" is the most theatrical piece of the opus where body language is the only clear and canonical form of communication. The instrumentation is pushed to its limits with acoustic and rhythmic guitars, electric cellos, and saxophones. The only thing missing is the conductor... no, there is one... it's Jel, with his electronic pads, setting the pace.
"Middleclass Kill" opens with a duet of voices and a muffled drum, then breaks out of its slumber in a whirlwind of refrains and keyboards.
"Midaz Gutz" is noir and decadent rap.
"Nomanisisland" is a falsetto lullaby, brass and strings, the slowest and most reflective piece.
"The Mercury Craze" the only single from the album, is extremely immediate, with a dry beat and one of the most gaudy guitar riffs ever heard...kitsch in the service of irony...."What if your blood weren't you?" sings Dose. Absolutely comical is the radio spot placed at the end of the track to emphasize that in the end, advertising is the soul of music... uh, the market.
There are no patterns, styles, or mannerisms (wow, the rhyme...Dose, I'll steal your job) that our guys don't touch, infecting them, and the siren at the beginning of "Bed To The Bills" seems like the only cure....forced internment.
"Returne To The Vein" is an escalation of tones where the flow of words is abruptly interrupted by 2 minutes of prog ramblings and picked up by the hair at the end, miraculously.
Even "The End" dares to last 8-minutes-8 and meticulously repeats every genre used in the album... too pretentious to be true... yet... shall we call it Extreme Crossover? Let's do it!
The curtain falls, the actors exit, they bow, the audience leaves almost threatened by a sudden and sad piano (on the first listen it seems the CD skips) and a tail to skip (deliberately, like in the cinema? This way, please, the exit is this way).
An album challenging for challenging ears, jam-packed with self-references, neologisms, samples, and mood swings, in pure Dose style, in pure Subtle style. It won't remain in history, it makes its own history.
P.S. The new work of the gentlemen reviewed here has just been released: "Exiting Arm" which, as soon as I have digested it, I will review.
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
06 Nomanisisland (04:20)
So much for beating your indoor chest
stood predator star,
never picked only placed before doors.
Do you not now know what you poet...
holding your breath arms akimbo
stood base thinking in flames of yourself
at the manned gates to fair switzerland's brink...
would you fancy say going solo forever instead.
Setting sail for good on a standard stranded man crafted raft,
equipped with nothing save few-hundred euros and the hypocrite inside you...
lost where life is all but perfect,
taking the longest cut across wide open ocean possible.
razor free and limeless on a never-again bent to kiss land tour...
...
and if things go well...
you might harvest plankton from the rotted raft's rope
for your supper, and for fluids take twice from yourself
a handful of urine sipped to grind spit.
In shark free waters you could paddle with your hands and feet for fun...
tipping her over if a rescue plane coasts overhead...
and at night feel for the moon making moves,
forcing form on your un-mastered and visible quarter mile of ocean.
And by day on your back watching birds
appear then dissolve in mid-migrate.
falling from a distant nowhere to an out of sight,
still looping in a starring role they'd played
in what's our early evolution...
and there you are sprawled out below them,
fast forgetting tenth grade physics
floating on a few killed trees tied close together...
Hi up above you
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...
And there you'll be,
lain prostrate chipping salt
from your lips with starvation soft teeth
sprawled out in the way of the sun.
You see no one truly cares if you take your bloated backpack,
big bag of tylenol, and the long way never into switzerland...
poor poor stranded and big gigantic poem man...
You have what sleeps inside you for your certain string of moments,
and its un-plan thereafter only for your done & once sensitive skin...
07 The Mercury Craze (04:40)
When last we left him...
our hero yes was recently diagnosed as being last haver
of a most unusual sort of blood.
quite surprised by the news himself,
(and still the genuinely unlucky man)
he now wields his one and only body bag
of this, his now very rare blood.
and so, we find him seated not starved but smalled,
before a really rather serious spread...
his evening's eats have been copped and bequeathed
by the richest of rich who's only child is especially sick...
their fair scared parent eyes reading weak...
yelling help across some 200 feet of set table
yours far full of edge... perfectly still like straight teeth
It seems so few would know just what to do as the new and improved lucky you,
to be courted and prized as someone else's very own personal blood mine.
I mean...What if your o-so unique blood... then became the latest craze...
would the dear disparate world not get the wrong/right idea,
You...now owning all your ever so happening blood...
You...sole proprietor of all that priceless red wet...
What if...
What if your blood were then all the rage...
What then...
What if your blood weren't you...
What would you give
in order to get your hands
on the latest most luxurious blood...
to have yours flushed completely
and replaced with that of a nice bright white
college boy or very viral multi-millionaire widow...
Would you later pay extra
for your old red tide to be glassed,
sat down, room warm beside your occupied hospital bed.
so that when you were well,
and in your right mind of redwets
and new whites. You just might
indeed, spill your own & old blood.
can't you hear your mercury just
ringing with the jingles already...
hey fool,
is there a terrible time to your life that never seems to let up...
is it a terrible time of the great nothing much...
what say you leave your past life's luck in the dust...
and let the miracle most of modern day at your blood...
(under the age of death)
(complementary bag of aspirin)
(imagine, Ice Cube's blood, running through your veins)
08 Bed to the Bills (04:50)
the next day
the exact same nurse is standing with her back to me
at every last passing bus stop.
only this time, what looks like a small stack of bills
with bat wings, is hovering just beside her.
they're bound together by a narrow wishbone,
beneath it rests a large bowl full of some indistinct fruit.
waxen looking still, atop a three quarter length corinthian column.
To the left is a rather fit "right" woman's left leg,
buried thigh deep in the hallowed and wood-chip topped bus stop grounds.
the planted lady's leg looking clean shaven and hot
sweat beading up about its calf in the black avenue amplified sun
an eye blue high heel jut in full bloom on its visible end.
and so you get off...
to find two suits arguing silent
before a double-parked and obviously unmarked cop car.
the blown-up head flesh of two big business men, a-hover above them.
a good foot or two of twine dangling from their tied off throats,
running down into their hollowed dress shirt collar mouths.
you over hear them mutter something serious about...
"the second hand emotion"
and then comes something like semi-poetic directions...
" a ways down commerce...then turn, dead straight into ashe" ...
and so you walk...
predicting all possible presents in ever to bits, and back
from the bed to the bills you see nothing
but pit within pit within pit, an undeniable feeding on you
and more this...
...
A honey smothered hand gun all covered in ants,
trembles on a three quarter length corinthian column...
10 Call to Dive (07:08)
The lids on Streetlights peel back
to reveal row upon row of bulging black bird eye.
all gorged out toward you like exotic zoo snakes
heaped up on fiberglass rocks,
fat with farmed rats coaxed down their throat...
below them in their brights,
tilt finished arrows beached up on thin tin signs.
and where its corrugated stem injects into cement
there is a deep fried breastbone,
popping hard half ate on a rich red curb...
all at once,
this moment has no mercy on your color find eye's
stole blues version of oakland...
as you make for thin ice on your you on you violent night.
the next morning everything begins again over a walk,
past a few balloons tied to a lovesick car-salesman's wrist.
you press on...
a soft bicycle wheel chained up
behind a savage looking pair of women's dress shoes,
abandoned to the left of a tire tread pressed dead pigeon
lain askew in more rich rose colored gutter.
there...there...
temperature taking your skin,
tinged city wind catching air
on your pleasantly imperfect and c-section shaped skull.
For once forget your headed to the mailbox
to drop more finished bills down to its gut...
even though for all you know...
that's about as far as those things ever go.
as sad as it is so,
kids today will never wear the perfect cape of clean air.
nor one true brand new brazier of sheer luck...
or does someone out there still expect that...
the way a moth gives freely of itself unto the bulb.
they will not learn their lesson from a teachers copy
of a blackened lung, hung in the classroom, on the coat rack...
or left dripping in the closet during math minutes passing.
nor from a nice new globe made of gold, cast in the shape of a half eaten apple...
not until...
the sun is on a stick.
the moon hung on a hook.
desperate times call for step by step schematics of the human dive.
The end...
(one mile of week&will later)
a sunset interjects.
donating the kind of red you only see in stores.
affording yourself a bit more reality,
some singular mood polarity .
If you could, you'd have a close friend
drive you off into the sinking pinks.
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