Album Review: DOOMED! by Open Mike Eagle & Kenny Segal
Eagle’s relationship ended just as he and Segal set out to build their first album together, and he turned the collapse into DOOMED! that stays funny even as the losses accumulate.
Kenny Segal had a problem. As Eagle told him, he was tired of lending beats or two to contribute to the making of other people’s albums and wanted to make one himself, and Segal agreed that they could make their own record. Then Eagle lost a girlfriend while making the record and had a lot of things to say. Those things he said turned into DOOMED!, fifteen songs in which he tells of one break-up via comic book frames, professional wrestling moves, video game controls, and the laws of parallel universes, till it’s no more the only one and becomes all possible variants of that break-up at once. Eagle mapped one breakup before, in 2020’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce. The tragedy here comes in as a farce and stays funny way longer than it would with a different author.
“She showed up with a bomb/And I signed up for the knives” is the mismatch that lies at the core of “Out to Lunch,” the conditions under which Eagle puts all those fights on his album that nobody wins. He compares himself to Roger Rabbit and says he cannot help how he’s drawn. He saw her favorite shows and joked with her dad; the two of them used each other’s EBT card; some of the funniest lines here open up to some pretty real feelings. The blue top sheet gives him a cold sweat. He plates only one plate when he has to eat now, so he asks to be taken to the moon, because she lives right next door.
What is the extent of the breakup? On the track “DOOMED!” the list stretches beyond the end of the breakup to his therapist, who repeated herself without realizing it; to his barber, who ghosted him; and, at the conclusion of his marriage, to his primary care physician, because he had her insurance. As Ryan Crosby provides the bass, the hook hovers on with “Doomed, snake-bitten, star-crossed/Cursed, ill-fated, it won’t launch,” a list of descriptors just as appropriate for an unfruitful rocket launch as a marriage. He plays the same gag in all of its permutations.
Winter comes to “Unfinished Concrete Initials,” with Eagle behind the wheel, his head down, snowblind, driving into the pavement with the hook as he writes his initials in wet concrete with a pipe that freezes before he gets around to the M-E. There’s nothing soft enough to melt any of it. Aaron Shaw’s saxophone and Jordan Katz’s horns are brought into the mix on “Out to Lunch,” against a song about the hush of a house, and Shaw’s flute and Diego Gaeta’s Rhodes come into play on “She Swear I’m Colorblind” as the couple in the song cleans the kitchen silently, the beauty settling over both scenes like a view over an unpleasant day.
Eagle’s verse on “She Swear I’m Colorblind” does all the talking at first, listing all the little failures to understand each other. She sees his inner color as dark blue; he doesn’t recognize her face without coke; he didn’t realize she was a smoker; they fall apart when he goes on tour; he hooks the seven-ten split with a gutter ball. Then billy woods comes in with the second verse and is left alone in the apartment after their argument, where the kitchen sparkles like an ice rink and you can hear a pin drop, tense like a slingshot.
The prison holds all the stuff that Open Mike Eagle loves stuffed into the comics, the wrestling, the video games and lyricism—as in how he imagines in “Sweetheart Jail” locking up the person he loves in a cell edifying enough to have dirt floors and terrible food in, and then wondering how he could be so cruel and unusual keeping them there, not even so much as phone call, all while protesters furious outside with signs and memes and such. Eagle admits modeling himself after Kitty Pryde jumping to Colossus but still chronicles a malignant fantasy of himself shooting a man in jail full of toxins, the only handcuffs around evidence for a jury of science fiction and fantasy to convict the dramatized study of a man and a woman. He borrows the dying Spider-Man from Infinity War’s “Mr. Stark, I don’t feel so good,” then responds with a nervous system weighing seventy pounds and exuding cortisol from feet to lungs, and then asks us if this is it, or if instead he just needs to pull more ice cubes from the booze before it runs out. In “The Irredeemable Magic Man,” he vanishes in a puff of smoke and hopes the bystander will magically get them horse legs to gallop home on, even though he knows they’re trained to human legs.
The interactive frame feeds back on the breakup through “Schrödinger’s Green Room,” whose ambient dread becomes a list of intrusive thoughts he imagines as a DJ in his head. It’s goofy, he knows, but when he posts on social media, they call him goofy. “I make what I make, period,” he replies, and moves on. All that said, the reach mostly pays off. The vent in “Trying to Remember What I Aimed At” is an unwelcome return to particulars: the execs standing outside to catch their fiends, the public tricked left and right. Eagle’s writing is quick as ever, and it may just be a trick of the light, as the target remains vague. It’s not that he doesn’t have his subjects and his objects, but he mistakes them for each other.
Standout (★★★★½)
Favorite Track(s): “Out to Lunch,” “DOOMED!,” “She Swear I’m Colorblind,” “Watching a Movie Called Freedom By Myself”