Rapid Fire Reviews: Word-Bending Hip Hop with Open Mike Eagle, Westside Gunn & R.A.P Ferreira
Component System With The Auto Reverse - Open Mike Eagle I've been a fan of Mike for a long time, since his verbose art raps on Dark Comedy wowed me with their creativity and bouncy pop culture references. While I thought his previous album Anime, Trauma and Divorce was just okay I still came into this record expecting the same level of greatness that I do for pretty much every new OME project that drops. The first thing you'll notice about this record is that it's pretty chaotically organized with 14 tracks that vary quite a bit in length and add up to less than 40 minutes of total runtime. The record also features several collaborators, particularly across the second half, giving it more of a spur-of-the-moment mixtape style flow than a conventional album. Despite that when more fleshed-out tracks emerge they can occasionally be great. Early on in the record 79th and Stony Island and I'll Fight You come back to back as big highlights full of the kind of n...