A stronger 'Relapse' than expected

Go ahead and call it a comeback.

Eminem's new album, Relapse (Aftermath ***), is his first since his worst, Encore, which came out in 2004. And no good news came out of the Marshall Mathers camp in the interim, from the shooting death of his best friend Proof (Deshaun Holton) in 2006 to the word last year that a not-so-Slim Shady had ballooned to more than 200 pounds and was starting to actually look like an M&M.

Couple that with "We Made You," the first single from the formerly incendiary Detroit rapper's new album, which comes out today. It's an inane Jessica Simpson- and Kim Kardashian-bashing trifle that utterly fails to recapture the gleeful transgressiveness that made his early efforts so disturbingly entertaining.

And add to that "Beautiful," the album's newest single, the only song (out of 15) that Eminem produced himself. That one is an unexceptional spoken-sung power ballad in which the woozy rapper borrows from fellow Motown rhymer Smokey Robinson to sensitively admit he weeps "the tears of a clown," while trying "to come to grips with the fact that I may be done with rap."

Taken together, you're not left with a lot of reasons to believe that either Relapse or its successor, Relapse 2, due in December, will reach the heights Eminem attained with ease from 1999 to 2002.

Back then, his dazzling three-album run - The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show (plus his work on the movie 8 Mile) - earned him so much love that just last year he topped Jay-Z in a Vibe magazine readers poll as the best rapper alive.

And, in fact, Relapse never peaks that high. But the good news for Eminem fans - and haters, who haven't had their misogynistic, homophobic provocateur around to blame for society's ills - is that none of those early indicators accurately predicts what the CD holds in store.

What Eminem's new album turns out to be is an impressively unified artistic statement about the horrors of drug addiction, and an unexpurgated look into the frequently horrifying mind of its deeply disturbed creator.

There are more than a few missteps, like the aforementioned "We Made You" and "Beautiful," plus pointless disses of Em's alleged ex-, Mariah Carey, and rape fantasies involving Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan.

Those are in keeping with the Eminem tradition of going after soft targets such as Christopher Reeve, the late Superman actor who was a paraplegic and frequent victim of the rapper's over-the-top tastelessness.

Just when you might think Em's gone too far, however, in "Medicine Ball," the rapper-as-ventriloquist makes a hilarious show of handing the mic over to Reeve, who, in a robotic voice, promises to come back from the dead to kill his tormentor.

After defeating him in a break-dancing contest, that is.

What holds all this together as entertainment - and art - is, for starters, the collection of taut, booming funk beats put together by Dre, who produced every track except "Beautiful," and unveils new tricks like a snaking Middle Eastern melody on "Bagpipes From Baghdad."

And what keeps it compelling is the torrent of sharp-as-a-tack high-speed verbiage from Eminem himself. One more celebrity detailing his substance abuse problems - and, on "Medicine Ball," recounting being molested, as a child, by his stepfather - might not seem that enticing. Even, that is, when it's done as outlandishly as on "My Mom," in which he tells of being raised on pancakes laced with Valium, and rhymes about "falling in bed with a bottle of meds and a Heath Ledger bobblehead."

But it works for Eminem because it gives him a deeply personal subject to connect with, after sounding listless and bored on Encore. And it provides the world's foremost self-loathing rapper with ammunition to fire away at his favorite target - himself.

In "Deja Vu," he recounts a near-death overdose, and tries to outsmart his daughter by hiding pills - Vicodin, Ambien, Methadone, whatever he can get his hands on - all over the house. In a telling between-song skit, a record executive hopes the rapper had fun on vacation "while the music industry melted . . . down. Do you know how many people lost their jobs because of you?"

And after years of trashing his mother in song, he's confronted with the ultimate horror - identifying with her as he looks in the mirror and sees that he's doing to his own child the very things he's been accusing his mother of all these years: "My Mom loved Valium and lots of drugs," he rhymes. "That's why I'm on what I'm on because I'm my Mom."

At 37, Eminem may have lost the capacity to shock. Even Relapse's serial-killer scenario "3 a.m." can't quite frighten us as much as the rapper routinely did back when he first emerged and the world at large seemed like so much less of a scary place.

Relapse is more of a step back artistically than a bold move forward. But it shows that even if, on merit, he may no longer deserve to be known as the greatest rapper alive, Marshall Mathers still has plenty of life left in him.