A New White.

(Lex)

Adam “Dose One” Drucker is one crazy mother. You may know his distinctively nasal voice, lightning flow, and impossibly obscure lyrics from any number of releases on legendary post-hop label Anticon (under aliases Deep Puddle Dynamics, cLOUDDEAD, Themselves with various permutations of labelmates), or from his solo collaborations with Aesop Rock, Prefuse 73, Revolutionary Ink and other heroes of the hip hop intelligentsia. His most recent project, Subtle, which features groundbreaking production from Jeffrey “Jel” Logan (Drucker’s high school pal and frequent collaborator) and live instrumentation courtesy of the remaining four members of the group, all old friends, tears down the fences between rock, electronica, rap, and any number of other conventional musical constructs, while avoiding the fusion miasma that swallows so many other genre-bending artists.

Opener “Song Meat” is just that: Drucker’s alchemical meta-composition of fragile lyrical fragments “which could never be songs.” Sidling into his fanciful form through a soundscape of Pole-like dub and fuzzed out guitar lines, he transubstantiates his snippets’ individual unsongness into lyrical gold. Dose sing-speaks couplets like “what’s left are fires beating off of faces” and “the bright red skeleton of a cynic” until the anthemic refrain of “no wet concrete for new song street…” kicks in paradoxically, negating the conceptual basis of the exercise through its cohesiveness even while expressing a total disregard for preconceived structure. In less practiced hands, the pretentiousness would be unbearable, but Dose’s warbling psychotenor carries its idiosyncratic dialectic perfectly, if not quite subtly.

“I (Heart) L.A.” is another high-concept piece that walks the fine line between art and artifice, but ultimately redeems itself through its boldy poetic indictment of utopian seduction. Delicate waves of acoustic guitar and electronic pulses dance over trash-can beats and mounting feedback, culminating in Dose’s staccato proclamation that “whats wrong with the world has to do with those fell in love with New York or Los Angeles or Paris or Jerusalem /and me of course.” Pseudointellectual “emo-rap” artists like Atmosphere’s Slug could never get away with spouting off lines like these; Subtle’s avant-garde abstraction demands to be taken seriously, and shows enough scattered brilliance to redeem its occasional excesses.

Not content to rest on their stylistic laurels after several rock-centric compositions, Subtle throw 90s Miami booty bass, fluttering woodwinds (played live by multi-instrumentalist Marty Danvers) and iconic breakbeats into the mix for “Red, White & Blonde,” the most immediately accessible track on the album (and, in an ideal world, an instant chart-topper). Alexander Kort’s soaring string accents on the eminently hummable chorus are only one of the countless sonic details that pepper the album, showing the group’s combined talent in conjuring elusive moods from unlikely juxtapositions.

Not all of “A New White” lives up to its early promise, however. After “Blonde,” Subtle seem content to slip back into the intermittent mediocrity that keeps many of their Anticon cousins frustratingly out of the privileged pantheon of underground hip hop breakthrough stars (the major exceptions being Slug and former Deep Puddle Dynamics member/slam poet Sage Francis). The opening of “F.K.O.” sounds suspiciously like an overplayed insurance commercial, and mostly instrumental exercises “The Hook” and “Eyewash,” while pleasant enough, sound like mediocre Múm outtakes that were accidently sent to Oakland instead of Iceland.

But although disappointing, such missteps are soundly vindicated by the dizzying heights of the climactic last few songs. The crushing epic “She” is as monolithic as a hip-hop Zeppelin, with Jordan Dalrymple’s vaguely Middle Eastern guitar screeches and massive Bonham drums backing Dose’s most cohesive lyrical narrative yet, still hopelessly scattered by non-post-modern standards, but this time organized around the attributes of the eponymous “She.” This song coincidentally shares its title with a Saul Williams book, Williams’ musical forays being one of the more accessible reference points for “She’s” bold take on musical synergy (especially the song “Om Nia American” on Amethyst Rock Star). “Stiff Fruit” ends things on a less chaotic note, sounding like an extraterrestrial campfire jam with Four Tet, with more than enough lyrical S’mores to go around.

Unlike their musical cousin Pedestrian’s recent Unindian Songs, Subtle’s endeavor has more than one and a half good songs (the former has only “The Dead of the Day” and a reheated version of Public Enemy’s “Arrest The President”). Although it has its rough spots, A New White. is easily one of the most innovative albums of 2005 so far, in any genre. Like Dose One’s legendary (and relatively impenetrable) Circle LP with producer Boom Bip, this music takes a while to sink in, especially for Drucker neophytes, but rewards repeated listens with some of the most innovative underground music, operating at the futuristic fringes where broad labels become not only arbitrary, but totally irrelevant.

—Will B. Payne