In an effort to combat iPod Syndrome and ADD, I’ve instituted a new morning ritual which involves listening to at least one album all the way through, rather than skipping around in shuffle mode. My day seems to go a bit better when it begins with a good solid album, at home drinking my coffee or during my commute on the bus.

And while sometimes my morning album is something old and familiar and motivational like Jawbox, it’s just as often something new, something that’s been in the queue for a while, that I just haven’t gotten to yet.

So it was that, a few weeks ago, I finally ripped and listened to the copy of Subtle’s For Hero: For Fool that had been sitting on my desk for four months. I received it from a particularly enthusiastic student of mine last semester. I pegged him as a kindred spirit almost as soon as the course began, the kind of student who, for better or worse, reminds me of myself when I was in college. When he gave me For Hero: For Fool he did me a huge favor, though I wouldn’t know it for a while.

It’s silly that it took me this long to discover Subtle. I love anything with Doseone’s fingerprints on it, from CLOUDDEAD to Hood to 13 & God to Prefuse to Aesop Rock. I love the Anticon collective. I love Odd Nosdam and Dosh and Why?. Maybe Subtle’s appearance on my radar was somehow delayed so it would come at just the right moment. Timing, after all, is everything.

Turns out, For Hero: For Fool was, and is, the perfect soundtrack and antidote for the late-winter/early-spring doldrums and all their attendant bullshit, from getting the two-day flu to having your car towed during a snow emergency, to clambering along slippery, halfheartedly-shoveled sidewalks on the way to the bus stop, running late as always, lugging a too-heavy art supply box and portfolio up the steps of the bus and sweating under the layers of sweatshirt and long underwear and hoping you didn’t forget the stack of student essays you promised you’d grade and hand back this week because they’re long overdue.

This is a strange album to love. It’s accessible but also inscrutable, profane but otherwordly, all rendered with a sick sense of humor. What does it say about me that my favorite song on the album (”Nomanisisland”) is about a man stranded—whether literally or metaphorically—on a raft in the middle of the ocean, subsisting entirely on plankton and his own urine? The rest of the album has a lyrical fetish with dismembered body parts and internal organs, so I guess it’s all relative.

The lyrics here are brilliant and obtuse and absurd and still often beautiful, worth reading on the band’s website since Doseone spits them out so quickly, they’re easily missed. (By the way, I love the way the group’s website operates. Much like their music, it’s beautiful and intricate but still entirely free of unwieldy or superfluous elements.)

To me, this relatively short album still feels like an epic. There’s certainly a progression here, and maybe this says more about me than Subtle, but it feels (and sounds) like the sort of narrative arc where things start out badly and only get worse.

I’ve listened to this album hundreds of times now, and I don’t know what its downward trajectory is about. Disaffection? Hubris? Mental illness?

Whatever the case, by the time you get to the “Middleclass” diptych, you will hear the baffled frustration of early-21st-century progressive America, if you don’t already. Anticon has.

By the time you get to the beautiful 6/4 outro of “Nomanisisland” you will hear the existential desperation of the indecision and paralysis we trade for intellect, if you don’t already. Doseone has.

By the time you get to “The Ends” you will hear the frantic, cacaphonous roar made by catastrophic turns of events and just plain shitty luck. I’m entirely certain Dax Pierson has.

Spring is coming. Tonight TV On The Radio begins a two-night stand at First Ave, and Subtle will be opening. I will be there, standing in the front and ready to jettison all that bullshit and more.

Subtle - “Nomanisisland” (mp3)