River sounds exactly like any other Ed Sheeran song, except Eminem is trying to kick-start his career over the top of it. Good, right?Īnd it just wouldn’t be 2017 without a collaboration with Ed Sheeran, the man who seemingly can pour cold custard into your ears and have more money than half of Africa for doing so. Times change too, and Bad Husband is a track about his ex-wife Kim that isn’t threatening to slit her throat, so… there’s that… he’s not threatening to murder his ex-wife.
#Eminem album review plus#
Despite the fact his faux-woke act is confusing, jumping the lowest bar possible, his penchant for wordplay & smart lines hasn’t waned a single bit, with the staccato delivery in Believe, plus lines like “Started, from the, ground up, like a snowman” showcasing just what got Eminem to the top in the first place. There’s no difference between the Eminem in 1999 and the Eminem in 2017 if you held him on pure flow & delivery. One of the few saving graces of this album is that despite being 45 and in the game for 29 of those 45 years, his delivery & flow is immaculate as it was on the Slim Shady LP. Although what he’s trying to do is balance an edgy new woke persona, whilst trying to keep the Venn diagram of Eminem fans who are also Trump voters on his side. Should you, Eminem, now listen to your other new track, Heat and take a good look at the line, agreeing with Donald “Grab ’em by the Pussy” Trump by saying “Why do you think they call it a snatch?”, read the FUCKING ROOM and decide that yes, this line is perfectly passable, but please, Eminem is now totally woke. Right, never mind, that’s just Eminem and that’s what Eminem does because whilst some go for laughs, he goes for gasps. You wouldn’t, would you? You’d read the room, realise that maybe weaving in a line about notorious rapist Bill Cosby isn’t such a good idea. Wanna talk tone deaf? #MeToo has been rolling on for a while now, so if you were Eminem, you’re a smart guy, you read the news, you see which way the wind is blowing, so you hit play on your new track, Offended, and then you think to yourself, “ Hmm, should I REALLY leave the line ‘I’m still copping a feel like Bill Cosby at will‘ in this track?”. īut lest we forget, this is the real Slim Shady we’re talking about here, so strides forward calling out the President for “banning transgenders from the military with a tweet” in Like Home ends up with a stride forward into a steaming dog turd with Ivanka Trump ending up in the boot of his car on Framed. This album is the equivalent of those verified weirdos who manage to shoot a fifty-tweet thread to Trump about thirty seconds after he produces some kind of verbal diarrhoea on Twitter, but the crux of it is “Buhhhhh DRUMPF is bad!”, whilst offering no real venom in their bite. Notice recently how “Bare Minimum Twitter” is becoming more of a thing? Boys who hold the door open & don’t send photos of their dick to your sister are the new Lotharios, and it’s never been harder to pole vault over the bar. In this vein, Revival is “Bare Minimum Protest Music”. Two singles in and already spent, Revival doesn’t really lift itself on the bed. However, Untouchable is about as good as it gets on this album. Recognising institutional racism, police brutality & his own white privilege, it was a different side to Eminem, a man once obsessed with killing his own mother, his ex-wife & anybody else who caught his bad side. Untouchable was also another promising single, if not for some shonky production values, something unbelievable on an album that credits Rick Rubin and longtime friend Dr Dre as producers. The lead single from Revival, Walk on Water, featuring the one and only Beyonce was promising enough and a surprisingly honest track from a man so used to dealing in absurdity and abject anarchy. With that evolution in the music business, Eminem’s post-retirement efforts have barely failed to register on the Richter scale, with Relapse & Recovery being largely disappointing and The Marshall Mathers LP 2 being the worst sequel since Taken 2.īut with Trump in office & the world in turmoil, surely that’s enough to get Em’s dander up to a point that he stages a career restart with his new album, Revival?Īs we touched upon earlier, rap has changed a lot, and Eminem was knocked off the throne a long, long time ago. However, since 2006’s Encore & Eminem’s subsequent retirement, rap has changed massively, with grime bigger than ever, and rappers have stepped the game up massively, with rappers like Kendrick Lamar & Kanye West at the very peak of their powers. Albums like the Slim Shady LP, Marshall Mathers LP & The Eminem Show were the creme de la creme of shocking, humorous and somewhat thoughtful rap, each track landing with the force of an atomic bomb. By Oliver Butler ( in the day, Slim Shady was the undisputed king of the rap game.
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