Open Mike Eagle and Kenny Segal: Doomed! review – caustic, crushing breakup album flirts with catharsis

(Backwoodz)
The rapper-producer duo muster a breakup record with glistening beats and lovelorn lyrics that mull over grievances without resolve

Tough as they may be, breakups make for good material. Doomed! is Open Mike Eagle’s entry into that wide canon – sitting alongside Tyler, the Creator’s Igor and Ye’s 808s & Heartbreak in the alt-rap subcategory – and finds the LA-via-Chicago rapper every bit as wide-eyed, caustic and, at-times, crushing as those who’ve Kübler-Rossed their way out of a relationship before him. Out of lemons, lemonade, and all that.

In fact, without the disintegration of his five-year relationship, he and Kenny Segal – the feted Low End Theory-reared producer who helms the entire project – might have been resigned to merely cropping up as occasional features on each other’s records forever. The breakup gave sessions a focal point, and half a decade’s grievances to mull. Or, as Eagle puts it languidly over lounge glockenspiel on Streets of Rage: Public Arguments Edition: “These is true stories told loosely.”