by Olivia Gilbert

Created on: June 16, 2009

In the 5 years he has been gone, Eminem has battled a tough drug addiction and suffered through the loss of his best friend DeShaun "Proof" Holton, providing him with plenty of new material to rap about. His comeback album, Relapse, falls nothing short of his best work.

Relapse opens with an eerie skit, Dr. West, about a corrupt doctor who doesn't seem to want Marshall to recover from his drug addiction. This sets the mood for the first track, 3 AM, which begins with the creepy intro: There is no escaping/there's no place to hide/you scream someone save me/but they don't pay no mind/goodbye. As Eminem describes psychotic serial killers, we a get a frightening taste of his twisted sense of humor.

Track 2, My Mom, is very different from 3 AM except that Slim Shady's strange sense of humor is still present as he blames his mom for his addiction to pills. You're bound to crack up at least a few times during this song, between the odd accent Eminem seems to have picked up in many of his recent songs, his mocking imitations of his mother, and the strange polka-like beat. And the big sarcastic smooch he gives his mom at the end is just the icing on the cake.

Insane is the perfect title for this next song, not just because it describes Eminem perfectly, but because this song IS totally insane, from the shocking lyrics to the fast-paced beat to the whole sexually abusive stepfather theme. It may be graphic, but this is one of my favorite songs on Relapse.

Bagpipes from Baghdad and Medicine Ball, however, were letdowns for me. They're fairly good as far as rap goes, but they're not anything outstanding compared to Eminem's normal material.

The song Hello is one of the best songs on Relapse, and I always find its catchy beat and memorable lyrics replaying through my head. It shows you how bad Eminem's addiction to drugs really was so clearly that you can see it play through your mind like a movie as you hear it: I lose a pill and I'm recklessly wreckin' the house/that was supposed to be breakfast/where the heck is it now? And we also experience the bliss he felt when the craving was satisfied: Maybe somewhere in the depths of the couch/oop, jackpot, yeah, open sesame mouth/down the hatchet the feelin' you can't match it/I rap-tap-tap on your door with a damn ratchet, ata-ta-tackin' a whore with a damn hatchet...

The eerie beat and music send shivers up your spine as you listen to Same Song and Dance, but you find yourself strangely drawn into it. Slim Shady

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