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It's an impressively focused and clever work. But this music is not transcendent. It's still stuck in Marshall Mathers' muck, his fundamental mistrust of pleasure and love.
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The music tends towards the functional rather than the fantastic: the idea is clearly to focus attention on the star rather than the beats, which seems fair enough, given the moments on Relapse when you're dazzled anew by Eminen, by the acuteness of his imagery and the relentlessness of his panic-stricken flow.
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The question remains unanswered, because while it was, undeniably, dull without him, Relapse is less 12 steps than a stumbling one backwards.
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Relapse, flooded with more Dr. Dre beats than any other Eminem album, is easily better than "Encore" but nowhere close to his first three albums, because he doesn't try anything particularly different.
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While Relapse is a slightly more energised record than the listless "Encore" (despite a Dr Dre production that is, for the most part, tired and dated), it's hardly the comeback many hoped for.
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The production is ultra-clean and the lyrics are delivered with a precision that is not to be scoffed at. But mostly what lasts is the self-pity and anger, which is at least enough to warrant our attention.
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The further Relapse strays from narrative veracity, the more one suspects his fanbase feels he's tapping into his bottomless well for horror-show grandstanding.
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He infuses Relapse with occasional sparks, but fails to transcend the same tired themes--except, of course, when he becomes Marshall Mathers, the Recovering Drug Addict.
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Unfortunately, the goodwill that Eminem builds up with these engrossing and macabre Mathers family confessions are too often torn down by his tedious turns as a goofy court jester.
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The overriding feel is of an album just too jaded, too joyless to truly count as a return to form.
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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.
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Now he's making albums about recovering from addiction, sounding worn out and uninspired. Dude needs to find a muse or something.
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Relapse can be an intermittently thrilling sonic experience until you realize everything sounds like a variation of 'What's the Difference,' 'If I Can't,' or even fucking '30 Something.'
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It’s less a relapse than a rehash, less a comeback album than the kind of album artists need to come back from.
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Relapse is really just another overlong summer blockbuster. We sit through it, then go look at pictures of kittens on the Internet, and wait until our souls snap back into place.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 889 out of 1078
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Mixed: 114 out of 1078
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Negative: 75 out of 1078
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BrianDMay 20, 2009I love the new CD, I don't know why so many people don't the accent is okay on most songs so yeah.
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Jun 23, 2011
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Jun 12, 2011