Eminem-Relapse Album Review

It's no surprise that Eminem's first new disc in five years would stick to the outline he and Dr. Dre wrote in 1997. Eminem dutifully hits all his marks here: "3 a.m." for bloody torture-porn, "My Mom" for profane family laundry-airing, "Beautiful" for carpe-diem slogans and "We Made You" for name-dropping celeb-blogging, marketed ostensibly to shock rap fans keeping up with the Jennifer Aniston/ John Mayer relationship.

But it's hard not to be as dulled to this stuff as Em repeatedly claims the drugs have made him. "Bagpipes for Baghdad" threatens by its title to be a dark detour like "Mosh" but ends up being mostly about Mariah Carey and Nick Cannon, and the "Paul" skit has a Christopher Reeve joke, again. There are flashes of inspiration: the brutal, brittle "Deja Vu" makes an emotional impact. It's good to hear Dr. Dre practicing his medicine again (no producer can better match Em's circus-tent horror); the disc is packed with satisfying hooks ("Must Be the Ganja," "Old Time's Sake") and Eminem's ridiculously fabulous flow. Now in his 30s, he doesn't surf the beat so much as box with it, with both brutality and no small degree of grace. That a rapper of this much verbal gymnastic ability is still making Perez Hilton cracks is too bad, but the bigger problem is that Eminem's recipe of gore and gay jokes sounds like the past.
Source : Billboard.com