Subtle

ExitingARM

Lex

www.subtle6.com

www.exitingarm.com

www.myspace.com/subtlesix

From the outset, something is different: ExitingARM’s title track betrays the Subtle blueprint by eschewing Adam “Doseone” Drucker’s rapid-fire lyrics-spitting for a mellower, lower-pitched vocal melody. The familiar nasal cadences of Doseone’s trademark emceeing appear soon enough, but he's still doing more singing than rapping, at least for now. It’s an indicator of the angsty pop sensibilities embraced by both the song and the album it begins.

ExitingARM is the final installment in a trilogy that began four years ago with A New White and continued with For Hero: For Fool. The saga follows the quixotic exploits of Doseone’s alter-ego, a rapper named Hour Hero Yes whose moniker, like the music he inhabits, suggests the hopeful yet dystopian reality that is the human condition, post-everything—or, as characterized throughout ARM and Hero, “the Terrible Great Nothing Much.” It’s The Wall revived and writ even weirder for the first fucked-up decade of a new millennium, a hip-hopera stranger and more ambitious than anything R. Kelly could conceive.

In voluble, free-associative lyrics rife with puns and portmanteaus that would make Ginsberg proud, Doseone reawakens the first two albums’ weighty themes: the middleclass plight (“A: What’s working man’s hope? A: They call it cope”), postmodern ennui (“To somehow have it so that the long arm of all apathy / might sit comfortably free beside the committed empty hopeful humaned world”), and the commodification of art (“Were it only meant to be adapted to the Hollywood dull / Leaving a red white and blind eye lain dull”). It’s too dense and bizarre to try and parse here, but Doseone has built an exhaustive Flash compendium that further explains and chronicles HHY’s story.

Subtle’s other five members erect an elaborate musical scaffolding for the story, an assemblage of sounds every bit as complex as Doseone’s narrative ambitions. The rhythms are rock-solid one moment, tweaked out and abrasive the next. Subtle’s hip-hop pedigree is readily apparent in the chest-throbbing beats and bass, but atop that a symphony of instruments is layered, a complex marriage of the organic (guitar, woodwinds, strings, live drums) and the synthetic (Moogs, ambient noise, bits and glitches, and vocals diced up by ProTools and/or Doseone’s frenetic delivery).

ExitingARM is also perfectly sequenced: the faster, more frantic jams that open the album are leavened by mellower tracks that pool near the middle, beautiful mid-tempo constructions that owe as much to ambient music and the New Romantics as to hip-hop. At the end of “Hollow Hollered,” a deep synth and sax ride-out on an industrial beat evokes the purple sky against which the birds from the next track, “The Crow,” come home to roost.

As with any opera, there are certain musical and lyrical signposts: the sad, tetchy saxophone lament—call it “Yes’ Theme”—that occasionally seeped into For Hero’s songs surfaces here at the end of “Wanted Found,” the penultimate track. The lyrics are shot through with skeletal and visceral imagery: broken teeth and transfused blood, the “cancel eye” and the skinned skull—reminders of our fragile corporeality. This overwhelming assemblage of ideas and music eventually culminates in a beautiful collapse at the end of the aptly-titled “Providence,” and the album comes to a close in much the same way its predecessor did: a drifting drone that tentatively closes Hour Hero Yes’ tale not so much with an explosive finale but with a whimper, irresolute and unresolved.