If you’re not already a fan of Open Mike Eagle, be prepared for his newest album Component System with the Auto Reverse to be an experience. If you’re already a fan, then you know to expect an experience, I’m here to say it’s an incredible experience!
In the second track of the album “TDK Scribbled Intro,” he tells us “every album is a little collection of pieces of yesterday / I don’t always have the words for the feelings… So I decided to make you a tape.” He works through complicated, contradictory feelings in Component System With the Auto Reverse. In “79th and Stony Island” (a reference to his home city of Chicago), he encourages the audience to “see the monster” in him because he thinks “the quick turns ruin us/ I used to love Big Bird, then I saw his n-word supercut/ And Kanye gets to me and then I watch his documentary/ I’m in a weird place mentally/ And don’t be ignorance is bliss-ing me/ If you ignore him, then you dissing me.” And still, after calling himself a monster, he promises us in the mid-album song “Crenshaw and Homeland” (a homage to the city he currently lives, L.A.) he’s not “too strange to groove to/ Half 2 Chainz and YouTube.”
While he’s working through contradictory emotions, he seems more confident with himself as an artist in this album than any before. He’s no longer asking us “WTF is Art Rap” like he did in his first solo album in 2010 “Unapologetic Rap Art.” Instead, he’s complaining that he’s still being asked this in every interview and celebrating the fact that “Twenty years in, now I know my own vocal range / I finally figured it out” in the mid-album track “I Retired Then I Changed My Mind.”
This album is less narrative than his other more recent albums, but it has all of the wit, introspection, lyricism, and stylized beats fans have come to expect from Open Mike Eagle. Ultimately, it’s a chaotic album, it plays with a lot of feelings and a lot of sounds- inspired by 90s boombox rap, L.A. and Chicago rap, and the reflection of his decade long solo-career. This album definitely made me happy that he changed his mind about retiring, I’m already excited to hear what’s next.