Eminem Relapse Album Review

[Taco John]

So I've listened to the new Eminem album about a dozen times, and I have to say that I think the album is brilliant. It's not perfect, but it's an effort that comes in at the A level.

To give some perspective, I really liked his Slim Shady LP, but I thought it was very rough around the edges and that he still hadn't pushed the level of his talent yet. I thought he came into his own with the Marshall Mathers LP, perfecting his style and gaining absolute control of his lyrical flow. To me, the MMLP is his best album, though I think he showed absolute mastery of his craft with The Eminem Show. The problem that I had with the Eminem Show was that I thought it was a little *too* slick and over produced. I love the album, to be sure, but it doesn't have the organic feel that The MMLP has. Encore, I thought, was terrible in comparison to all of them. I liked some of the stuff on there, but Eminem had said anything interesting that I thought he could say at that point in time. To me, he hit the wall that every successful rapper is bound to hit: we've heard it, you've got nothing new to say, and you're so rich that you no longer have street cred anymore. Frankly, I had thought Eminem had done the right thing by closing the book on his career and only doing small projects and producing (ala Dr. Dre).

Boy am I glad I was wrong about that.

This new album, while containing some of the same themes we've seen in the old album (namely the drug use of his mother and its fallout in his life), contains a lot of new and fresh stuff and gives listeners a peek into the world of Eminem since his pseudo-retirement.

The album is essentially therapy for Eminem, with the major theme being his relapse into the world of drug addiction and prescription pill popping. There's a lot of hate and anger in this album, and he hits you in the face with it right out of the gates, but what you find as you journey through those gates is that the deeper into the album you get, the more he aims that hate and anger at himself.

The first three songs absolutely put my jaw in my lap - the first song being an anthem to mass murdering. It's not a particularly new theme for Eminem, but it does have a more graphic edge to it than his past stabs at this theme (sadly, the pun was intended). The music and lyrics come together in a very haunting way that made me seriously question the guys sanity. But he doesn't stop there. As you leave 3am with the image of Eminem being a deranged psycopath who is ready to butcher people in a drug induced black-out, he does something very interesting by leading you back in time with the songs "My Mom" (My Mom does valium and lots of drugs, that's why I'm on what I'm on, cuz I'm my mom), where Eminem talks about how he has inherited his drug addiction from his mother. From there, he blows the hinges off the door with the song "Insane," where Eminem reveals a history of being sexually abused by a step father (If you could count the Skeletons in my closet). By this time my jaw was in my lap.

The first three tracks hit me like a ton of bricks, and I thought the album was going to be very heavy. Eminem doesn't necessarily lighten the load, but from this point on you no longer feel like you're staring alone at a dead baby in a dumpster. The next song, Bagpipes from Baghdad flashes to the not so recent past where Eminem does a little of his usual Slim Shady celebrity bashing stuff. It's a catchy beat, but not a particularly strong song. The most interesting thing is that he reveals that he's been clean and sober for at least a year now (who’s-gonna-go-see-the-doctor first? we’ll do a coin flip, i just got my one year sobriety coin chip).

The next song on the album, called "Hello," is a sort of re-introduction to Eminem. It's a very good song with some double meaning to it. The question is whether or not he's reintroducing himself to the fans, or re-introducing himself to the pill addiction (as though it were a person). It's an excellent song, and he doesn't hold back as he reveals how low things got for him:

I lose a pill and I'm recklessly wrecking the house
That was supposed to be breakfast where the heck is it now?
There's the necklace I lost, right next to Stephanie's blouse.
Man I should check to see if my mum left any out
Nope! Guess I'll reroute
Maybe somewhere in the depths of the couch
oooh, Jackpot, yeah
Open Sesame mouth!

In the song, he reveals that his recent "pnemonia" bout was actually an overdose situation where he had to be rushed to the hospital.

The album then takes another dark turn, as Eminem flashes back into his mass murdering persona with a skit about a stranded girl getting into the wrong car with the wrong person, and leading into "Same Song and Dance" where he basically kills Lindsay Lohan and Brittney Spears. By this time, the mass murdering schtick has worn a little thin, and the album leads into the Radio Pop friendly "We Made You." I'm not a big fan of Eminem's radio pop. I understand why he has to do it, and I think that he's very good at it. But I don't find it particularly interesting - and certainly not compelling. But it can be fun when I'm in the right mood. This one, in my opinion, is one of his better radio pop efforts, so at least there is that. But by this time in the album, I was starting to tune out a little bit.

The next song provides the funniest moment in the album, when Eminem gives Christopher Reeves the last word by rapping AS Reeves, complete with robotic voice and long drawn out mechanical breaths. Needless to say I was shocked but tickled by the picture he paints of Reeves battle rapping against him:

Eminem on coming to kill you [long mechanical breath]
Always hated you and I still do
You'll never fill my shoes my superman costume [long mechanical breath]
Doesn't even fit you they don't feel you
You're takign this shit to far [long mechanical breath]
Who do you think you are
Hang my suit up in the armoire
Everday I hate you more and more
Throw down the cardboard
Let's break dance if you think you're hardcore


The Paul Berman skit after this is probably the funniest moment of any of his albums.

From this point on, the album maintains a high level of interest. Stay Wide Awake continues the horror theme of the album - which really comes off to me as a self defense mechanism to protect himself from just how much of his soul he bares on the table (especially later on in the album, with Deja Vu).

Old Times Sake is a great collaboration with Dre that I think is one of the best they've done together. Must Be the Ganja has a good beat, flow, and is pretty catchy.

The album climaxes here with Deja Vu, which I think is probably one of the best songs of Eminem's career. It starts with a skit that is essentially a recreation of the scene where the paramedics are treating him for overdose as they start to rush him to the hospital. He goes from the extremes of painting himself as an evil murderer, to this song in which he completely bears his soul showing just how vulnerable he is. I think the song is brilliant. The beat is spot on. The flow is absolutely superb. The lyrics are deep and penetrating. When someone asks me why I listen to Eminem, this song is a good one to offer up as a damn good reason. The whole experience of this song is hypnotic and it just gets better with each and every listen as you're drawn deeper and deeper into the lyrics and the thoughts behind the lyrics. I can't say enough about how great this song is.

The next two songs are anti-climatic, but still worthy efforts. Beautiful seems like a song he wrote for his girls, which I dig. And then Crack a Bottle is the star studded reprise to the album, featuring Dre and 50 Cent.

At the end of the day, I find that each time I listen to the album, I like it more and more. It's what I wish The Eminem Show was (with the Eminem Show being Encore, and Encore being some B-sides that never made it into an album).

The bottom line is that it's a worthy effort. Eminem has reinvented himself with an album that fans will appreciate. This isn't the cruise control album that Encore was. This is Marshall Mathers working his ass off to produce something worth releasing, and definitely worth listening to.


4.5 stars.

[luv]

Yay! I have a friend "providing" me a copy.

[Mama Hip Rockets]

Originally Posted by PunkinDrublic

Little Wayne is the most overrated rapper of all time. I don't understand why so many people kiss this guys ass he ****ing sucks. I like a lot of hip-hop but Little Talent is way overhyped.

totally agree. he is terrible.

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by PunkinDrublic

Little Wayne is the most overrated rapper of all time. I don't understand why so many people kiss this guys ass he ****ing sucks. I like a lot of hip-hop but Little Talent is way overhyped.

I'm not kissing his ass, I'm point out that he is one of the others adept at supplementing his flow with timbre, angry, defiant, jovial, sad, you hear it in his tone as well as the words.
If you want to equate it with Dane Cook's talent for presentation over substance, I'll grant that willingly, but it is a talent, A talent, not the final word on rap talent, A talent.

[Thig Lyfe]

Originally Posted by Reaper16

Pitchfork, just like Rolling Stone and Spin and every other major music media source that happens to love "indie" rock & hipster bands above other genres

Rolling Stone is hipster?

[KcMizzou]

Originally Posted by SportsRacer

Rolling Stone is hipster?

Rolling Stone gave it 4 out of 5 stars....

So how did Eminem spend his time off? Drugs, mostly. "I fall in bed with a bottle of meds and a Heath Ledger bobblehead" doesn't even begin to cover it. Relapse, Em's first album in nearly five years, is studded with brand names, but not Lexus or Cristal — more like Lunesta, Ambien, Vicodin, Valium, NyQuil and other brain candy that helped Marshall Mathers turn himself into a zombie, before he got clean last year. It's hard to keep all the drugs on this album straight, but that's probably the point. Relapse is like a hip-hop version of Richard Pryor's Live on the Sunset Strip, the classic 1982 stand-up flick where Pryor makes the audience squirm through jokes about freebase addiction and setting himself on fire. If it's stronger than his last album, Encore, that's because Em's doing what he does best: cleaning out his closet. And there's more psychotic shit piled up in there than ever.

The power of Relapse comes from Em aiming his beat-downs at his truest target, himself. By letting Dr. Dre take over the low-end-funk production, and rhyming about things he actually cares about, he comes up with a more painful, honest and vital record than anyone could have expected at this late date, up there with The Eminem Show or maybe even better. The album it recalls most is his 1999 major-label debut, The Slim Shady LP, from the stripped-down Dre beats to the self-lacerating wordplay. There are no familiar pop samples from Aerosmith or Martika or Heart, no rock choruses, no guest cameos beyond a couple of verses from Dre and 50 Cent. Instead, Em gets down to business, because this guy's got real problems. (None of which he blames on his ex-wife, Kim, who isn't even mentioned — whew.) "What's a beer?" he asks at one point. "That's a devil in my ear/I been sober a ****ing year/And that ****er still talks to me, he's all I can ****ing hear."

"Déjà Vu" is a brutally funny confessional, unpacking the whole gruesome story of where Em's been lately: addiction, rehab, overdoses, ambulances, hiding his pills from his daughter in video boxes. When he went to the hospital in December 2007, it was reported as pneumonia, but Em admits, "That whole pneumonia thing/That was baloney/Was it the methadone, ya think?" When Hailie finds him passed out in his car with a bag of Three Musketeers bars, he makes excuses and pops more pills: "It's 12 noon, ain't no harm in self-inducing a snooze/What else is new?/**** it/What would Elvis do in your shoes?" He's always made a joke out of identifying with Elvis, but the joke stings a little more now that he's passing out cold on the bathroom floor.

Sobriety hasn't brightened his personality, that's for sure. "Insane" begins, "I was born with a dick in my brain/****ed in the head," and goes on to elaborate a disturbing tale of childhood molestation. "My Mom" takes on a familiar object of scorn, but with the claim that his mom is exactly who he's turned into, drugging himself into a stupor in front of his kid. In the singsong chorus, he chants, "I'm on what I'm on/Because I'm my mom." At the end, he mutters, "Sorry, Mom. I still love you, though." (Good Lord, is he doing Step Nine? Because that will take him at least three or four entire albums!)

Just as Richard Pryor looked miserable taking audience requests for corny old Mudbone routines, there are songs here where Em flogs himself through the motions to rehash same-old shtick. The singles "Crack a Bottle" and "We Made You" are two of the weakest cuts, recycling beyond-stale boasts and celebrity disses. (Who were Amy and Blake, again?) In phony woman-baiting and gay-hating rants like "Stay Wide Awake," he sounds like an old retired hockey coach yelling at the kids on his lawn. In moments like these, he sounds unsure of himself, trying to guess what people expect from him, and that eager-to-please sweat doesn't suit him. It's no coincidence that the one where he raps about killing Lindsay and Britney is called "Same Song and Dance," as if even he realizes how played-out these jokes are — the only shocker is that he left out Nicole Richie.

He sounds more honestly screwed up in "Beautiful," his touching attempt at an inspirational ballad, singing, "Don't let them say you ain't beautiful" in his gawky voice. On the other end of the emotional spectrum, there's "Old Time's Sake," where Dre drops tasteless lines about getting Em stoned again. "Medicine Ball" goes back to cracking mean jokes about poor old Christopher Reeve — but in one of the album's funniest moments, Em turns himself into Reeve so the late, great Superman can get the last word in from beyond the grave: "Eminem, I'm coming to kill you/I always hated you and I still do."

There's a lot of hate on Relapse. Eminem hates himself for getting sober only slightly less than he hates himself for doing drugs in the first place. He hates himself for being famous, for hating his mom, for taking so long to make this album. (In one skit, his old nemesis Steve Berman taunts him, "You hide out in Detroit for almost five years while the music industry melts the **** down? You know how many people lost their jobs because of your ****ing vacation?") All that negative energy helps him fight the temptation to become comfortably numb. If you hate Em, he probably wouldn't blame you. But Relapse is reason to be glad he's still around.

[Reaper16]

Originally Posted by SportsRacer

Rolling Stone is hipster?

The reviews sure are. Not to the degree of, say, Spin, but they love the same shitty bands that Pitchfork and Spin do.

[Reaper16]

Originally Posted by Baby Lee

I'm not kissing his ass, I'm point out that he is one of the others adept at supplementing his flow with timbre, angry, defiant, jovial, sad, you hear it in his tone as well as the words.
If you want to equate it with Dane Cook's talent for presentation over substance, I'll grant that willingly, but it is a talent, A talent, not the final word on rap talent, A talent.

Lil Wayne is ****ing ass.

[Thig Lyfe]

I get my reviews almost exclusively from A.V. Club. Pitchfork is too snobby and Rolling Stone is too mainstream. A.V. Club tends to take into account what an artist is trying to accomplish as well as an album or movie's wider context (such as genre and target audience) but is still far more likely to approve of a TV On The Radio album or David Wain movie than a Katy Perry album or Michael Bay movie.

[Priest31kc]

Originally Posted by Reaper16

Lil Wayne is ****ing ass.

Lil Wayne is awful. He sounds like a dying cat. I hate him.

I still dont understand why all these young folks love him so much, they think he's cool, when I think he's just plain weird. He sucks, one of the most overrated rappers ever.

[Reaper16]

Originally Posted by SportsRacer

I get my reviews almost exclusively from A.V. Club. Pitchfork is too snobby and Rolling Stone is too mainstream. A.V. Club tends to take into account what an artist is trying to accomplish as well as an album or movie's wider context (such as genre and target audience) but is still far more likely to approve of a TV On The Radio album or David Wain movie than a Katy Perry album or Michael Bay movie.

I likes me some A.V. Club. Well, they don't cover metal or prog rock, which combined is probably 60% of what I listen to. But aside from that, I like them a lot.

[KC native]

Originally Posted by Priest31kc

Lil Wayne is awful. He sounds like a dying cat. I hate him.

I still dont understand why all these young folks love him so much, they think he's cool, when I think he's just plain weird. He sucks, one of the most overrated rappers ever.

I can't stand lil wayne. That being said, he has a million dollar delivery. His mic presence is hard to deny. I've said it before (not on here) that if he ever got a shred of lyrical content he would be amazing but until then he's a novelty act sold to suburban kids.

[Baby Lee]

Originally Posted by SportsRacer

I get my reviews almost exclusively from A.V. Club. Pitchfork is too snobby and Rolling Stone is too mainstream. A.V. Club tends to take into account what an artist is trying to accomplish as well as an album or movie's wider context (such as genre and target audience) but is still far more likely to approve of a TV On The Radio album or David Wain movie than a Katy Perry album or Michael Bay movie.

I think they overhated Katy Perry a bit, it's fluff, but it's not the apocolypse. But I guess that's what you get for trying 'lesbianism' on like a hat.

[kysirsoze]

Originally Posted by SportsRacer

I get my reviews almost exclusively from A.V. Club. Pitchfork is too snobby and Rolling Stone is too mainstream. A.V. Club tends to take into account what an artist is trying to accomplish as well as an album or movie's wider context (such as genre and target audience) but is still far more likely to approve of a TV On The Radio album or David Wain movie than a Katy Perry album or Michael Bay movie.

Don't read a lot of reviews there but I did just read their review of relapse and I'd say they did not adhere to your claim bolded above. Not that I can't understand some of the issues they took (Pop-culture references that have run a little thin, etc.) but I feel like they grabbed a reviewer who has never like Eminem and was just drooling at the chance to blast his new effort.

Sure Em fell back into some of his old ways, but that was his point. He has come through his recovery and, in some ways, brought his music full circle to the days of Slim Shady LP. He hasn't gone the route of most rap superstars where all he raps about is the old days and how none of the new rappers respect him. Thank God.

I do, however, hope he takes a step in a new direction with relapse 2 or these same critics will begin to be validated.

[Demonpenz]

i like to read music critics, but i don't really care what they say

[Taco John]

Originally Posted by Demonpenz

i like to read music critics, but i don't really care what they say

That's what the three wolves shirt is all about, my man...