Doomed!

At this point, Open Mike Eagle’s output has begun to feel less revelatory than expansive — he’s put so much of himself out there, particularly in the years since 2020’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce, that it feels like an attempt to build an autobiodiscography. The concept of DOOMED! is steeped in a referential geek-culture atmosphere that’s lost its old thrill of youthful escapism; the album’s subtitle is “rap songs about a relationship that ends in every possible universe,” and it’s populated by unhappy reflections of once-carefree pleasures: having to watch every buzzed-about new movie alone (“DOOMED!”), finding far too much to relate to in a mid-franchise downer Marvel ending (“Infinity War Spoilers”), and invoking a particularly aggravating Adventure Time character to describe the feeling of squandering your remarkable abilities by using them for capricious social hit-and-run bullshit. Some listeners might hear the familiarity of someone trying to find a real human reaction to heartbreak in an irony-damaged extremely online world that’s proving a weird fit for your middle age; others might just sink in to his constantly evocative imagery, where memory lane is depicted as a post-breakup series of booby traps (from “Don’t Go Look (Battleworld Focus Prayer)”: “The second tier gets our home movies in a clamshell form-factor/I watched the snippet, it’s a porn backwards”) and reconnecting with your past means fixating on the loose ends and could’ve-beens (“Unfinished Concrete Initials”: “Agonizing over deletions/Flushing evidence, pain is better in secret”). Producer Segal has been a great fit for Mike from “Idaho” to “No Selling” to “WFLD 32,” so it’s no surprise his versatile sour-soul bleariness sustains a full-length collab. It all thrives on a paradoxical state of sounding simultaneously lucid and bummed-out, whether it’s through weathered yet unstuck-in-time electric-key late-nite glides (mid ‘80s neon on “Trying To Remember What I Aimed At”; ‘60s-via-‘90s chop-ups in “Science Fiction / Fantasy”) or borderline-ambient lo-fi codeine jazz (the bucolic tension of billy woods feature “She Swear I’m Colorblind”; the stunning ether-noir closer “Watching A Movie Called Freedom By Myself”). Just like the ‘90s-vintage stereo deck that’s become his part-time on-wax DOOM mask, he’s constantly rewinding through his thoughts and making pause tapes out of them, and his usage of humor as a coping mechanism has become finely-honed to the point that it feels singular among living MCs — DOOMED! being the point where he’s become a master in terms of making listeners go “ha ha… oh.”