On their first full-length together, Segal pushes his soulfully psychedelic beats into more forceful territory, offering solid ground for Eagle’s grimly sardonic post-mortem for a failed relationship.
In an interlude during the final stretch of DOOMED!, an unidentified woman lays out the album’s thesis: “Break ups are… tough.” There’s a wincing smile in her voice, and the pause she takes is deep enough to hold all the complexities and contradictions that are revealed when it’s time to cut bait—every argument, regret, sigh, swoon, and silence. Throughout the album, Open Mike Eagle takes that pause, stretches it wide, and turns it upside down, dumping the contents of a recently ended five-year relationship onto the floor. To do this kind of post-mortem on a partnership requires a willingness for bloodletting, and once you’ve arranged all the shards, you may realize that you’ve assembled a mirror.
Like any serious existentialist—“I used to wonder if I existed,” he blurts on “Schrödinger’s Green Room (There But Uninvited)”—the Chicago-raised, Los Angeles-based Eagle revels in the mundane, finding the absurd profundity in the tiny idiosyncrasies that felt cute but should’ve signaled incompatibility, and the moments that small quarrels turn into blow-out fights. More importantly, he sees the patterns: the instinct to bail when the going gets tough, the response mechanisms he’s developed to deal with disappointment and rejection, the escapist retreats that ultimately backfire. What begins as a straightforward breakup album turns into a treatise on how to deal with collapse. When one part of your life is falling apart, how do you hold the rest of it together? Can you?
For Eagle, humor seems to be the best way, or at least the most natural one, to cope—after all, one of his best albums is the aptly titled mission statement Dark Comedy. For the better part of two decades, he has carved a niche for himself as a sly and sardonic wit, cracking wise at the world’s bleakness. He can be modestly self-deprecating, like on “The Irredeemable Magic Man,” when he admits, “I know what I did, ’cause I did it so many times,” or that his “dreams be on some bullshit,” on “Trying To Remember What I Aimed At.”
The grifts and rackets Eagle details on “The Many Hustles of My Lonely Time Traveling Uncle” feel silly and over the top until he spits the hook, “I used to make a lot of money.” Suddenly, his tales of trunks full of black-market Beanie Babies take on the sardonic, wine-drunk reaction to a partner’s needling at an increasingly awkward dinner party. On the title track, he dissects his cut-and-run instincts, reeling off all the people and things he’s bailed on: his therapist, his family, countless anime shows; in the coda, he complains about now having to see new movies alone. “This breakup shit is ass,” he says, chuckle souring into a grimace. “I saw Superman by myself, I saw the Fantastic Four movie by myself”—and so continues the litany until we’re laughing at how sad and serious his point is.
Behind the jokes is an encroaching darkness. The exasperation in Eagle’s voice turns every softly crooned hook into a slumped exhale. His signature syncopated flow feels even more spacious than usual, as if each line were tiptoeing on a path of eggshells. Eagle seems surprised to find himself shut out of his own life. In his telling, every bit of success is temporal, every instance of comfort a toe dipped into the warm, welcoming pool of complacency. He rarely comes off as completely bitter, but there’s a slight folded-arms twinge when he describes being ignored at parties or cheering on his friends’ television appearances. Comics, video games, and sci-fi novels all serve as lenses through which to refract his discontent. And even though his verses are steeped in metaphor, each line is more direct than usual, stripping away some of the dazzling multisyllabic rhyme schemes he favors for frank, plainspoken sentences.
The effect is stark: It’s clear he’s dissatisfied with aspects of his career, but he at least understands the work a creative life entails, unlike the partner who, on “She Swear I’m Colorblind,” can’t handle it when he leaves to go on tour. There doesn’t seem to be any pleasing anyone, least of all himself, and he delivers many songs in a whisper, as though trying not to rankle anyone in earshot of his grievances. The gravity of his hushed delivery can make DOOMED! a little hard to listen to.
To complement Eagle’s cobwebbed writing, frequent collaborator and fellow Project Blowedian Kenny Segal provides a palette of childlike synth melodies and classic funk grooves, slathered in the faded-memory haze of tape-hiss saturation. Even at their dreamiest, like the corroded lullaby of “Don’t Go Look (Battleworld Focus Prayer)” or the cocktail-lounge jazz of “Infinity War Spoilers,” the beats are more forceful than the feathery, cassette-loop psychedelia of Eagle’s last few records. Segal makes sure to keep the low frequencies hefty and the drums chunky, offering Eagle solid ground to stand on at a time when he’s most at risk of floating away.
That tether proves beneficial, allowing Eagle to pull himself back to the earth after his thoughts and anxieties send him careening into the cosmos. From a sturdy perch, returns to his core philosophy: We don’t need to pretend like this shit isn’t difficult. It’s always worth acknowledging how painful, ridiculous, and petty this life can be, because when it’s over, as he posits over the eroding drones of “Watching a Movie Called Freedom By Myself,” “Ain’t no post-credits scene/We can all just leave.” Boom, done. You may, however, look back at all the twists and turns you took, all the mistakes you made, all the beauty you experienced, all the love you shared—however fleeting—and finally see yourself. Whole, flawed, perfectly imperfect.
