Gig Review: Open Mike Eagle At Belgrave Music Hall And Canteen
Open Mike Eagle proves that great rap doesn't need spectacle, turning a laptop, a crate and two decades of experience into a captivating one-man show.
Open Mike Eagle is a D. I. Y. rapper from Chicago. If you didn't know that already you could infer the D. I. Y. part from his stage set-up. “I've got too many buttons up here” he says out of the half-cocked microphone he holds in one hand while the other cues his next backing track. But he is overstating the complexity of his set up, which includes a MIDI controller sat on top of a plastic crate and a laptop perched on what looks like a tool box.
The man doesn't need much to put on a show, though. Eagle announces the organizing principle of his set in its glitching, trembling opener ‘Raps For When It’s Just You And The Abyss’. In the first quarter of his measured, melancholy delivery he spits “Trying to make shit that sounds Grand Budapest / with the same hand that slams his computer desk”. What Eagle has is all that he needs to replicate his diverse discography. Over the course of his set piano keys, warping electric guitars and synths shoot across sparse drum beats and a bassy rumble that at times makes the room rattle.
Eagle raps on top of this. His style is personal, confessional. It sounds like you’re listening to him read aloud his morning pages, or transcribe a recording from a therapy session. People refer to his music as ‘Art rap’, a term he seems to have little patience for on ‘I Retired Then I Changed My Mind’, a song where Eagle looks back on his career and you watch it with him, Being John Malkovich style. Eagle has been doing this for more than twenty years. The crowd is thinner than it should be, but it appreciates every part, from the more mellow first half of the set to the aggy second half which starts after ‘ok but I’m the phone screen’ which plays like a dream sequence. Here Eagle recounts the loss of a cellphone and with it the architecture to several song ideas. A member of the audience requests Eagle play ‘Relatable (peak OME)’ and with its plunging bass, and vexed delivery it becomes a highlight of the set. “Sometimes the audience is right” Eagle concurs.
There is appreciation too when Eagle pays homage to his hero, MF DOOM. Explicitly, on ‘For DOOM’ and after when he plays DOOM’s ‘That’s That’ start to finish which is juicier than anything else in the night's arsenal. The audience closes it out by singing along. Homage is paid implicitly too, when Eagle freestyles verses in a way that DOOM might approve of. He does this on the set closer ‘95 Radios’, a mellow, nostalgic standout from Eagle’s career. But it should have been played earlier in the set. Its lo-fi, easygoing beat slows the pace just as Eagle was building up a head of steam. But it's hard to argue with anything else tonight. Eagle has been doing this for twenty years. He knows what to do.
Photography By: Robert Adam Mayer