Most reviewers who’ve been at it for a while have a list of artists who remain elusive to them. It’s not that they find the music lacking; in many cases, they connect very favorably with the projects in question. It’s that, for whatever reason, the work doesn’t exert an imprint, doesn’t get filed in some aesthetic archive. If the artist is mentioned, a sonic, lyrical, and/or energetic association isn’t readily accessed. It’s almost like having a localized amnesia when it comes to act x or y.
Sometimes that amnesia is cleared when an access point is finally (and usually randomly and spontaneously) encountered. For years, I had trouble retaining an impression of Depeche Mode’s music. At some point, listening to Violator for the umpteenth time, a contextual understanding arose and clicked into place. It brings to mind that experience when the “right light” falls on a familiar scene for the first time. You see something that’s been there forever. Eureka.
I’ve had a similar experience with Perfume Genius over the years, though I’ve appreciated each project he’s released since 2014’s Too Bright. Interestingly enough, it was 2022’s Ugly Season, an anomaly of sorts in the PG oeuvre, that, for me, revealed Hadreas’s leanings, the breadth (and tension) of his Romantic sensibilities. My relationship with his discography, including his recent release, Glory, changed after that, songs and albums landing in appropriate files (with links to other related files; i.e., the mysterious chain of memory), ready to be plumbed if/when necessary.
Open Mike Eagle is another act I’ve found persistently elusive. When Dark Comedy came out in 2014, I listened to the album three times in one sitting. The introspection, the disparate audial collages, the cautious confessionalism and muted swagger spoke to me. The album struck me as a hip-hop milestone, though somehow I couldn’t corral the set’s gestalt, emotionally or aesthetically. Each time, as “Big Pretty Bridges” ended, I realized that I had no singular impression of the project, only a vague feeling: Eagle was navigating the traumas of the past, his adoration for and recoil from the rooms, streets, and people of his adolescence. Most of us have an ambivalent relationship with our origins, and this was potently conveyed, even if I couldn’t retain the slant, the energy, the sub-MO of his delivery.
2017’s Brick Body Kids Still Daydream spotlighted Eagle as he dived deeper into his proclivities for portraiture while honing an ability to view the past, including trauma, through the lens of understated humor. Humor is a throughline in Eagle’s work, at least since Brick Body, a recognition of the ultimately impersonal nature of tragedy, even if it’s his tragedy. 2020’s Anime, Trauma and Divorce, meanwhile, is Eagle’s synthesis album, the set in which his penchant for witticisms and grief-venting came to full fruition. His lyrics were more precisely rendered, his characters fleshed out. His narratives were more seamless, referencing the archetypal conflicts and initiations reflected in canonic drama throughout the ages. With both albums, despite being moved, I was left groping for palpable associations; a branch in the flood, so to speak.
With his new album, Neighborhood Gods Unlimited, Eagle again offers rich portraiture, narratives, confessions, declarations, and implicit social diagnoses. “me and aquil stealing stuff from work” initially lands as quotidian, soon swelling into a compelling origin story or bildungsroman. Eagle and guest Mr. Aquil capture the way young people are lured by symbols of wealth (“Mephistos”), and subsequently overwhelmed by the anticlimax of ownership and the exploitative side of capitalism; “Like how the hell I work and be still broke? / Mephisto? Ain’t that short for Mephistopheles?”. Child Actor’s production is complementarily woozy, surreal; the listener feels as if he’s standing on a rickety scaffold that could give way at any moment.
“ok but I’m the phone screen” similarly describes a pedestrian occurrence (misplacing your phone). Navigating thoughts and feelings anyone could relate to (“Did I drop it in the road? It’s looking like it, no? / Maybe never had it, like I left the thing at home”), Eagle quickly elevates the piece into a commentary on loss of control. There’s nothing like the panic that surges when you think you’ve lost your phone – a uniquely contemporary jolt that evokes a uniquely contemporary sense of dislocation. And yet, the agitation that’s described is timeless, part of human hardwiring. In this way, throughout Neighborhood Gods, Eagle navigates a line between the epic and the diaristic, the archetypal and the trivial.
As a result, Neighborhood Gods frequently feels as if it lands somewhere between Vince Staples’ opaque reflections on Dark Times and the more abstract literary tone of billy woods’ Golliwog. While Staples emerges as the quintessential outsider, uncertain about his current life and disconnected from his old stomping grounds (geographically and psychologically), Eagle’s plunges into the past are characterized by a distinct remove, as if he’s crafting biography rather than autobiography (bio-fiction rather than auto-fiction). Also, while Staples’ tone on Dark Times is urgent, exuding a sense of burden, Eagle often radiates a degree of equanimity, as if he’s already resolved whatever it is he’s processing. Staples arrives at confessionalism via emotional necessity, Eagle via artistic prerogative.
woods, meanwhile, is more language-driven, a student, first and foremost, of the poetic line. While Eagle is certainly capable of well-crafted verse (consider “I bought some pieces of a human heart / Three-fifths of mine had been euthanized” from “michigan j. wonder”), he’s ultimately more vernacularly oriented, albeit with a poetic flair; “I play the same game musically / I want some big, chunky, gold orangutan jewelry”, again from “michigan j. wonder”.
Kenny Segal’s production on “Contraband” interweaves trumpet lines, clean beats, and catchy guitar runs, a mock-chill vibe that recalls 90s rap. Eagle references his early love of music (“Chopped my old self up to acid jazz”) and the way in which his creative ventures probably saved him from a life of crime (“Bought myself back in plastic bags”). Child Actor again facilitates a surreal soundscape on “relentless hands and feet”, employing a metallic/hypnotic whir that loops throughout the track. Eagle expresses his capacity for awe (“The fact that we exist is magic”) while offering some of the more self-exposing lyrics of his oeuvre (“I had to fight a rapper’s apathy to get this beat / I’m fighting self-doubt to walk this street”).
The production approaches on Neighborhood Gods are surprisingly congruent, despite the involvement of various people with varying styles. Child Actor plays helmsman on six tracks, mostly forging fluxy soundscapes, mixes that suggest: nothing, neither life nor language, is stable. Kenny Segal’s work is lighter, more minimal, crystalline. Nolan the Ninja’s production on “rejoinder” is particularly striking – dreamy, contained yet moody, an ideal complement to Eagle’s free-flowing plot regarding relational ruptures and loneliness. Eagle’s voice on his sung chorus is perfectly paced, his timbre just right.
Eagle’s signature blend of viscerality and disinterestedness, as explored on Neighborhood Gods, will probably stick with me. Then again, perhaps referentiality is passé. We live in the age of solipsism. Truth is relative. Belief eclipses facticity. Impermanence is the water we swim in, even as we grope for anything that resembles land. And, as scientists, court-room lawyers, and podcasters keep telling us, memory is as generative as it is recollective. Neighborhood Gods is a potent, enticing, and, yes, elusive project. Worst case scenario: whenever I revisit it, I can experience it as gloriously new, something I’ve never heard before.
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