so my perception of it is a little different from yours. personally i find the last half to be a bit of a drag. there are some real clunkers in there and it kind of picks up towards the end but not really. i'm with you on the following points though:

> IMO the most
>"authentic" version of the character Dumile raps through.
>
>OD feels like an album spawned out of a very real depression
>related to Dumile's life events and environments. He raps like
>he crawling out of it through his music, and it feels like the
>rawest of poetry to me.
>
>MV is Dumile owning and knowing how to perform the Villian.
>It's wonderful rap music to this day, but revisiting OD
>recontextualized how Dumile crafts the character of DOOM
>through the lyrics/music.

very well-observed. all of these were facets of the album evident to me when i first listened to it. there's definitely something raw and vulnerable about OD that's missing from his other albums (there's a little of it on /born like this/), and it must have been a great context provider for someone like yourself who came to it after listening to his mid-career albums