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.

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 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.