Review Summary: Am I the ONLY one who likes this album?
Well, no. But I'm in the minority, it seems. Yes, I'm a bit late to the party. Yes, his voice gets a bit annoying, and yes, his rhymes are a bit irrelevant. But if people would separate this album from the rest of Eminem's work, as it seems they have with Recovery (which is more by Marshall Mathers than any other part of him), I think it would be enjoyed quite a lot more.
The album's first track, a skit, actually sets the mood pretty well, which I rarely think about skits, since I find them useless unless they're supposed to be funny. But as Em wakes up from a nightmare of relapsing, we're sent directly into
3 A.M., a slow paced song with arguably the worst chorus in the entire album. Annoyingly slow and incredibly poor lyrics, but the rest of the song makes up for it, not in content, but for the flow that the world loves Shady for. Yes, content-wise, it lacks, but this song, like most the album, is quite a lot better when not taken seriously. The same can be said about
Bagpipes From Baghdad,
Medicine Ball, and
Hello, as far as songs with crap choruses (we're talking "Shove a gerbil in your ass"
Fack bad) and great flow go. Honestly, these are pretty decent songs... just as long as you aren't looking for either:
A) The Old Shady
or
B) Meaning
Because you are not going to get it.
However, there
are some really solid songs, most notably
Insane and
Underground. Honestly, I think this why people bothered taking this album seriously for just a couple moments. Each of these tracks are what we loved about Eminem back in the Slim Shady LP. With lyrical complexity and literary devices used well, intense rhythm and flow, and a heavy beat behind it, we've got our old Shady back, at least for a couple tracks.
But for every good track, there's a bad one.
Same Song and Dance has multiple different problems that most people hated about the album as a whole:
1) Lack of complexity.
2) Boring beat.
3) That annoying accent amplified a couple times
and it's pretty overall generic. Sadly, this applies to multiple songs, like
Must Be The Ganja and
We Made You. However, Same Song and Dance is probably the worst of these; the other two can be decent the first couple of times, but the replay value is pretty low.
Dr. Dre makes a couple appearances. Isn't it sad when you bring someone into the track and he outraps you (which he's no stranger to, like in Drips)? In both
Crack a Bottle (which also has 50 Cent) and
Old Time's Sake. This doesn't mean that the tracks are bad; no, they're actually two of the best, mostly thanks to Dre. I would complain about the tracks themselves, but compared to past work, I wouldn't call them masterpieces (ironically, this is what I'm trying to avoid: comparing to the past).
But can I really call this album great? Hell no. Am I trying to prove this is worth that sort of rating? No. But overall, the good outweighs the bad, and I found this to be a decent album in the end. Would I recommend it? Only as a rap album, not as an Eminem record.
