Regardless of its merits and flaws, Subtitle's full-length debut confirms the arrival of a rap innovator in the tradition of Kool Keith, MF Doom, Doseone, and Missy Elliott; naturally, attempts to pigeonhole him end in futility. After crewing L.A.'s underground rap scene with Project Blowed and others, he's breaking out on the predominantly no-wave indie Gold Standard Labs, big-upping Pink & Brown and the Mars Volta. Sub's an emo-rapper at heart (pun intended-- check the Oberstian chorus on the title track: "Young dangerous heart/ Just to let you know I'm not done with you/ Even though you may have a hole in you"), but he embodies his vulnerable human sentiments in a sputtering glitch-hop that epitomizes cold technological precision. These contradictions congeal into a music that's unmistakably Subtitle's own, so when he brags about his innovator-status, the bluster is earned.
With dense cyber-babble, Subtitle builds his lexicon from the ground up, and while a few weak MCs get served and a couple sketchy corners held down, gun-talk, crime-thought, and materialistic tropes are largely absent. Instead, we get human holograms, quarter inch jacks, hydrofoil travel, pixilated portraits, Gigapets, software upgrades, .jpeg files, schematics, optic cables, firewalls, motherboards, and C++. When Sub talks about being "out to rip charts apart" on "Con-Contrived (I'm Not)", we assume he means wiring diagrams, not Billboard. Threats of violence appear as musical, not physical warnings ("Give me an 8-bit machine, I'll take out your whole crew"), and Sub seems more worried about getting nerve-gassed on the train (getting paranoid over the squelchy bass of "Subtalk") than getting carjacked on the Ave.
But like most MCs of note, what Subtitle says is less important than how he says it, and here, he's the MC-as-hypnotist, his voice as mesmeric as a spinning pocket watch. He splits the difference between Del's monotonous lilt (Deltron 3030 is this album's closest antecedent) and Gift of Gab's tripping, alliterative flow, and if this rap shit doesn't pan out, he could always fall back on recording vocal samples for Speak & Spell. Driving home his ghost-in-the-machine aesthetic, Subtitle spends more time breast-stroking through his beats than rapping over them, and liberally applies that strobe effect that makes his voice sound like a Dntel production.
Fleshing out a handful of self-produced tracks, Alias drops a typically ethereal beat on "Gio-graph-ick"; Lab Waste partner Adlib sears, slithers and glides on the title track and "Cray Crazy" (a standout featuring perfectly assimilated cameos from Busdriver, No Can Do, and Aceyalone); Octavius catches spooky wreck on "Killer Drones on Street". Sonic density is paramount-- it's not Dälek dense; you can make out the components, more like King Geedorah "No Snakes Alive" dense, and often just as unhinged. The album falters over its own bloat (17 tracks) when it forgets about thickness, notably on the going-nowhere bass skeletons of the Subtitle-produced "Palm Fronds" and "Where To?", but Sub shows promise as a beat auteur on the faltering electro dirge "Springtime in Rufferdam" and the nearly grime-caliber sinew of "Serial Boxes". If rap's future is tending toward simplicity, this is the Jetsons version, all flying bubble cars and robot maids.
