Brick Body Kids Still Daydream

Mike Eagle manages to balance the sense that he is speaking for many with the certainty that no one else could do it quite the same way.

Impressively, Eagle maintains a coherent aesthetic across 12 tracks by ten different producers, a muted brood that resists the default loudness of mainstream hip-pop. There’s a lushness to the production absent some of his earlier work.

There is a fair amount of glitchy electronica, but there are also more straightforward loops. They compliment Open Mike's melodic delivery and the wistful yet angry mood of the album. Sammus and Has-lo also offer verses.

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is a sublimely reflective slice of nostalgia with none of the comfort or security that term implies--it’s a both hysterically funny and sharply political skewering of the games nostalgic reverie can play on people, and a people’s consciousness. [Oct 2017, p.67]

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is the very definition of a slow burner. It lacks a track as instantly iconic as ‘Doug Stamper’ off Dark Comedy, but it reveals its layers and details gradually.

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is Eagle’s seventh solo album, and builds on his hot 2014 work, “Dark Comedy.” The difference? Scope. Like the composer Stew did in his 2006 rock musical “Passing Strange,” Eagle makes grand narrative connections across “Brick Body Kids ...” and does so through his skills as a storyteller and rapper with a sublimely confident flow.

These are passive recollections that come off as quietly rebellious, because he plainly acknowledges the value of the black voice, as well as the weight of its silence.

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream offers everything you’d expect from an Open Mike Eagle album and rivals Dark Comedy for the best in his catalogue. But it’s also his most thematically coherent work yet.

Brick Body gives the feeling of sitting curbside on a warm summer's eve, surrounded by friends. The beats are welcoming, jazzy, and minimal while Mike sing-raps his poignant lines in a typically poetic and smooth cadence.

One of Eagle’s more consistently engaging outings, this elegy for the since-demolished Robert Taylor Homes projects the 36-year-old rapper grew up in isn’t necessarily one of his most ear-catching records. More than his other albums, it’s consumed with his thoughts, possibly even a bit smothered; it cries out for some showing to break up all the telling.