Eminem

Kamikaze

On Kamikaze, Em trades predictable song structure—pop star-crooned hooks sandwiched between wordy verses—for bars that B. Rabbit might spit in an 8 Mile battle.

Eminem has returned with a very solid body of work after being longed counted out as a venerable threat.

Love him or hate him, this is the most energetically engaged - and simply enjoyable - Eminem has been in more than a decade.

Kamikaze is the sound of Eminem with his back against the wall, and this has led to some of his most invigorated writing in years - albeit with some troubling lyrical results.

Kamikaze is the result of Eminem's anguish; a scorched earth assailing of anyone who dared to doubt or diss him, that sees the Detroit rapper return to resentment for his muse.

As a whole, the album may not be impeccable, but it’s the best he’s released since 2010.

Eminem’s always been at his best when he’s pissed off, and for all its ‘poor me’ posturing, ‘Kamikaze’ at least feels honest.

The hooks are middling and the moans at his critics get tedious – but a flurry of brutal potshots at witless SoundCloud rappers prove Eminem can still hit exhilarating heights.

How riveting all this finger-wagging is probably depends upon your birth date. Hip-hop has moved on from Mathers’s high-speed, foul-mouthed wit.

His second album in less than a year, Kamikaze is the latest and most disappointing entry to Eminem’s never-ending encore, a boot camp of knotty, joyless, lumbering ragers aimed largely at a rap game that’s passing him by.

For all its merits, Kamikaze is not a world to get lost in. It is a single, angry diatribe from a man unable to reckon with the fact that his art no longer appeases the culture at large. In future, Eminem would do well to wield his astronomical talents to a message worthy of them.

While Eminem’s verbal dexterity has remained intact, his shortcomings have grown more glaring with the passage of time.