The upcoming Subtle album (October 3) is the best, most complete album I’ve heard since Kid A, and I fucking love Kid A, and right now I love the new Subtle album more than I love Kid A and this is after a two month honeymoon with daily listens, because I run every day, and I listen to this album every day when I run, and despite associating it with my shit knees, I still love the hell out of this album.

It’s called For Hero: For Fool. It’s also going to be the favourite album of 2006 for at least two other CMG writers who aren’t allowed to change the recently-expressed contents of their minds. I don’t give a shit if Jay-Z’s “Consulting” album (when you’re retired, but too poor to stay retired, you “consult”) due out on November 21 of this year featuring lots of expensive co-consultant producers is going to maintain the undue hyperbole bullshit shitstream of hyperbole bullshit (Blueprint is good, Reasonable Doubt is incredible, The Black Album insufferably self-congratulatory and the other stuff I don’t like enough to get through) (plus he did a record with R Kelly, which is inexcusable, even if you do later try to have him shot). No, not even that should deter or detour anyone from admitting that Jay-Z cannot write a record that’s part of a trilogy of albums that examines the modern human condition by analogy to a conflicted rapper’s lifetime “success” through the attainment of self-sustainability through art while always questioning “Why?” and half-realizing that he’s pimping himself and half-realizing that the self-pimping is what pays his Starbucks and also satisfies his goals, while working in touches on well-publicized personal and personnel tragedy and slow, happy recovery, and incorporating Kool G Rap cadences with Brian Wilson harmonies over arrangements so dense and textured that the band itself can’t remember who sampled what and cut and pasted which sample where, and being generally cold when you need a stern rap-to, warm when you need comfort, like the magic bag that it is. That also features Jel’s best drum work yet. Which is also saying more than we’ve been giving credit for.

I mean, why the fuck would Jay-Z want to do that?

If you’re like me, you forgot how good “smart” rap can really get, and had started settling for stuff you once called materialistic bullshit just because it became utterly impossible to avoid. I’m not pitting Subtle against the Consulting Firm, but I am saying that there’s more than one pyramid to climb, which I had forgotten until about, oh, two months ago. Come on now, think back to how you felt when you heard Clear Blue Skies for the first time, or how, every time you went back to Buhloone Mindstate you heard Pos’ warning that “The days of the breaks / are just about over” louder and clearer, or, just, just recall how you caught yourself thinking that A Book of Human Language only gets better. The feeling can come back, it’s still in there, so start getting giddy, call some old friends, dig out some old IRC mixtapes from Illwafer or GrantP while you wait about three weeks. Get refamiliar.

In conclusion: “Mercury Craze” is the first single from For Hero: For Fool, the cover of which looks like this:

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