Eminem — Relapse

Relapse

Interscope/Universal

Kate Harper (CHARTattack)

05/21/2009 4:30pm

If you're thinking Eminem's first album since 2004's Encore is anything different from what Shady's done before, think again. Despite the introduction of pills into the equation, Relapse is pretty much your typical Eminem album. Were this The Marshall Mathers LP or The Eminem Show, that would be great. But this is 2009, not 2000 or even 2002.

Relapse comes with all the necessary (for Slim, at least) doses of misogynous murderous fantasies ("3 A.M.," "Tonya," "Same Song & Dance"), celebrity disses ("We Made You"), ambivalent feelings about his mother ("My Mom"), familial abuse ("Insane") and rhymes about drugs ("Must Be The Ganja").

There are attempts at innovation on Relapse, but for the most part they're just downright laughable. Eminem seems to have developed a bizarre, Sean Paul-esque "reggaeton" inflection that shows up on many tracks. It can be most prominently heard on "My Mom," on which he rhymes about valium and how it "was in everything that I ate."

This is even more ridiculous on "Bagpipes From Baghdad," on which he fuses Middle Eastern music and the reggaeton voice and ends up sounding like a swearing version of Matisyahu.

Recognizing you have a problem and trying to correct it is certainly admirable, but it's almost impossible for anyone to take anything Eminem's saying seriously here. Even if he's doing it to mock reggaeton and the entire new dancehall phenomenon, it just doesn't work.

Elsewhere, Shady's up to his same old tricks. "We Made You" — with its typical disses against Lindsay Lohan, Samantha Ronson and too many others to count — best represents this. Eminem's similar earlier tracks were hilarious because he did the celebrity diss in a more shocking and outrageous way than anyone at the time (the Moby dig on "Without Me," anyone?), and his rhymes were excellent. I'd wager "Everybody wants to discuss me/So this must mean I'm disgusting/But it's just me, I'm just obscene," is one of the greatest lines in hip-hop this decade. But by Encore, that shit was getting old.

The old Shady's still trying to duplicate his formula and failing on Relapse, and it proves it's a method that's well past tired.

Maybe it's appropriate that one of Relapse's tracks is dubbed "Same Song & Dance."

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