Subtle
Saturday, Jan. 20
The Troubadour
As the Troubadour staff began to set up for Subtle’s headlining set, it was obvious that the audience didn’t quite know what to expect.
The props that littered the central stage area ““ which included a set of fake teeth, a massive painting of sinister black claws stealing a heart from a handless arm, and a bust of a man with a black-and-white striped skull in place of its head ““ elicited a variety of incredulous responses from the crowd.
One attendee went so far as to exclaim, “These guys must be crazy.”
But before Subtle had even finished its first song, “The Mercury Craze,” it was clear how entirely rational and meticulously planned their stage setup really was; the macabre props corresponded perfectly with Adam “Doseone” Drucker’s dark lyrics, which often address death and suffering with strange, surreal imagery. Even Drucker himself, wearing a white suit and black-and-white striped vest, matched his faceless cohort.
Though the group was touring without its official sixth member (Dax Pierson, who was left paralyzed after a car accident in February 2005), their signature brand of experimental hip-hop lacked neither energy nor depth. Subtle’s dichotomy of styles ““ a drum machine used interchangeably with a live drum kit, prerecorded samples alongside guitar riffs, a cello and bass-boosted synthesizer playing simultaneously ““ sounded as seamless live as it is does on record.
Drucker remained the center of attention for most of the night; the mellow, attentive man who many fans had come to know through conversation at the merch table became a hyper-animated and thoroughly captivating stage presence, full of strange facts and anecdotes. Before the band began “Return of the Vein,” he casually informed the audience that George Washington did not have a wooden jaw as legend says, but instead a jaw composed of lead teeth, slave teeth and filed-down hippopotamus teeth.
He introduced “Midas Gutz” with a somber rumination: “When it comes time to kill, will you perform your task unflinching, or will you close your eyes and simply survive it? What kind of killer are you? … Will you be?”
The night managed to stay lighthearted, however, with the dark side of Subtle’s character tempered by Drucker’s sarcastic sense of humor and the audience’s enthusiastic participation. The evening’s only shortcoming was, unfortunately, in the vocal department; Drucker’s microphone would have benefited from higher volume and some of the more interesting harmonies from their records could not be reproduced live. But in the end, this hardly mattered; people were still watching Drucker, taking in his every exaggerated facial expression as they listened to him.
Their set, which came up just shy of an hour and a half, drew almost entirely from the collective’s most recent album, last year’s excellent “For Hero: For Fool.” “Middleclass Stomp” and “Middleclass Kill,” thematically connected songs on the plight of the United States’ wage slaves, were among the crowd favorites, the songs’ constantly shifting dynamics highlighting Subtle’s singular style.
When Subtle returned to the stage for the encore and began to play one of their older tracks, “I Love L.A.,” the crowd erupted in applause. Taking one of the skulls in hand like a 21st-century Hamlet with his departed Yorick, Drucker chose to close the evening with a profound irony as he sang, “I think what’s wrong with the world / has to do with those / who fell in love with New York / or Los Angeles or Paris / and Jerusalem, and me, of course,” criticizing the materialism of the contemporary society in which he performs while coming to terms with the fact that he, like everyone, will inevitably succumb to its will.
E-mail Duhamel at dduhamel@media.ucla.edu.