Stream: Open Mike Eagle, ‘Raps For When It’s Just You And The Abyss’

Andrew Veeder on January 29th, 2015

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Following the release of his wonderfully sharp and thought-provoking album “Dark Comedy” last year, Los Angeles rapper Open Mike Eagle is back with the six-track “A Special Episode Of” EP, due out next week via Mello Music Group, and featuring production from Exile and Gold Panda. The first track to surface is “Raps For When It’s Just You And The Abyss,” with a bleak and muddled beat from Lo Phi that swirls with the distortion of a filtered thunderstorm. Mike’s rhymes continue to be heady and smart, name-checking everything from “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” ISIS, R. Kelly videos and Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl” in the first verse alone, then dropping lines like, “I’m so right-brained, I can’t grow an even beard / I wonder if I balance sh*t out would things seem as weird;” “Eyes mad low, grin wide just like a cheshire cat / Got four dimensional skin, my chin is a tesseract;” and even, “Some folks leave rap and never look back / If you tried it yourself, you woulda understood that / Make films, play ball, write, or even cook crack / My famous homies picked the right sh*t to get good at.” The track even flips the chorus from Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl,” reinterpreting Emily Haines’ high-pitched lyrics “Used to be one of the rotten ones and I liked you for that / Now you’re all gone, with your makeup on, and you’re not coming back” into his even-keeled tenor delivery. Please keep ’em coming.

||| Stream: “Raps For When It’s Just You And The Abyss”