The last album was the Relapse. This is the Recovery. If we’re referring to rap skills, the titles should be switched. Relapse was a major recovery from the album-by-album degression that had him going from the best famous rapper ever to just another famous rapper. It wasn’t his magnum opus, but it was as close as he’d come in a long tme. This Recovery, created in place of what was originally planned to be Relapse 2, which wouldn’t have made sense anyway, has him taking a huge step backward.

Hard to find, after just one year, is the witty wordplay that enveloped a lot of the Relapse project. Eminem doesn’t seem to care or seem to be aware as he insists this album is better than that one. Stans who liked that album will suddenly agree, so instead of taking drugs, raping girls and killing people, he’s sticking to more socially-accepted themes like partying and telling the people he loves how much he loves them. The Proof tribute, with its cheesy synths and corny chorus, induces vomit, not tears.

The accents are gone and that’s a relief, but in their place is a stock delivery in which he yells each word as if he’s saying something impressive, which only works when he is. I want to hear him do a whole album rapping like he did on Tim Westwood’s radio show a few weeks before the release of this album. He was on with Royce Da 5-9, who would’ve been a more appropriate guest rapper here than Lil Wayne. That’s the Underground flow, which is just as angry but not nearly as boring.

Surrounding these boring monotone verses with bland choruses featuring the top pop stars of the day; Rihanna’s dry annoying voice has no business spewing hooks on an Eminem album; only make matters worse. Pink could’ve been replaced by any generic female singer and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference, but it’s an unknown singer named Kobe and the off-key way he says “yeah” on the stupidly-titled Talkin 2 Myself that stands as the album’s wackest, most cringe-worthy moment.

The album’s gayest moment is when Eminem admits, in what seems to be all honesty, to being jealous of Lil Wayne at some point during the last couple of years. That’s ironic because it’s Lil Wayne he now allows to, as Nas would say, murder him on his own shit. That’s not to say Lil Wayne’s verse on No Love is anything special, but it’s surprisingly more impressive than Eminem’s, which is basically a case of rapid-fire style over substance. I can only imagine the slaughter Royce would’ve carried-out.

The decision to abandon the traditional album skits; leaving characters like Paul Rosenberg, Steve Bergman and Ken Kaniff missing in action; may be wise, but, for the sake of conceptual continuity, their absence should’ve at least been explained in a bar or two. Without their voices breaking the flow to say what they have to say, this sounds like some kind of departure album; the new direction I sort of expected Eminem to head in last year before I was pleasantly surprised with the Shady-inspired Relapse.

He says his copy of that album is now in the trash, but I don’t care what he says. That album, even with all those silly accents, is much better than this one, which is lame and tame in comparison. Did I mention that you can hear Rihanna’s dry annoying voice on one of the songs? If Relapse weren’t released just a year ago, I’d think Eminem has lost his edge and is on his way to becoming one of the gay pop fluff artists he used to make fun of. Listening to Going Through Changes, perhaps he is.

“Critics never got nothing nice to say,” the high school dropout complains, but that’s not true. His albums are often praised by critics. Many would put The Marshal Mathers LP among the best rap albums of all time. The idiots at Rolling Stone even went back and upped their four-star rating to five. So I’ll add about this album that the first song is good and there are some knockout punchlines sprinkled about. The “flying-crayon/nine-grand” rhyme scheme is classic Eminem. That’s about it.

my rating : 3 of 5

2010