Not crudeness for crudeness’ sake, but twists into surrealism that serve to challenge the fallacies of manhood and competition. Humour that exposes itself once again on _‘Midas Gutz’_ where dose experiments with the sinister in the silly: _“Charles Bronson’s angry and gay only daughter / Ice Cube back from when he was hard / And a framed 8-by-10 of Joe Namath's kneecaps”_ and _“Turned up with nothing but a loin cloth / To protect your tender penis from what's danger and the wildlife”_. Drucker emotes on _‘Middleclass Stomp’_, _“Like a leading white male should be / Like a man who's had every single nerve removed / Swapped with copper wire, been given gazing globe teeth / Had both eyes capped off with factory glass”_, with a verve and, crucially, a humour that is sometimes missing in the six artists’ previous work. Thematically, Subtle paint broad strokes with tender pokes at the listener sinister goings on within domestic bliss, the mincing nature of everyday struggles and aspirational dreams flipped and achieved with sterile compromise.
Externally and contrarily to the above details, Subtle’s presence on LEX/EMI doesn’t transplant their very anticon traits – they remain eternally committed to the manifesto of the progression of music and with _For Hero: For Fool_ have outdone almost all material released by anticon with regards to vision, bravado and musical breadth. Words plucked from streams of conscience and mangled to conjure pop imagery beyond mere inventiveness massaged instrumentation transforms deformity into Technicolor hooks, snapped through nerves creating minor tremors due to these wild flights of fantasy orchestrated by the Subtle collective.Ī brief interlude if we may, for the maths: Subtle is the melded input of Adam ‘doseone’ Drucker, Jeffrey ‘jel’ Logan, Jordan Dalrymple, Marty Dowers, Alexander Kort and Dax Pierson - and if that line-up strikes you as one that should belong to anticon, you’re not alone. When music is this visceral and so right on a spiritual level, when talk of beats and wordplay become irrelevant to the portrait that is so glowingly decorated, it looms high above meagre human notions of mortality. Is it crass though to place life, art and the taking of one to deny the other on the same axis? Within the confines of Subtle’s work, it’s a resounding no. On a freezing cold night on the 24th of February of 2005, as humanity loses and gains its fellows, as ideas and love, sins and hate, bid adieu and make their entrance to our suddenly empty canvas, musician Dax Pierson teetered on the edge of an abyss and held onto the frayed rim of existence until regaining a packet of breath – then **Subtle** fell back into the fabric as one and _For Hero: For Fool_ reappeared on our collective radar, the pink hankies of Pierson in tow. Circumstance shreds linear existence life is blindsided by movements through space as no being stays still, life moves into and out of pure homogenised sedation and we nod as one.