6.5/10
Favorite Track: "Darkness" Least Favorite Track: "Marsh"
In this new era of Eminem’s career it seems as if surprise releases have become the norm. Revival was received so poorly by critics in part by virtue of the track list being released before the album. The hate that Shady got for having pop features on the project was bad before he released it, but after the hate was ten times worse. This brings us to the release of Eminem’s eleventh studio album titled; Music to be Murdered By. On MTBMB Em still seems stuck in his ways but this time around it isn’t a driving force in the project. Where as Kamikaze felt like a response, Music to be Murdered By feels like an album. Sometimes, it feels like too much of an album. With it’s monstrous runtime of 20 songs, it’s easy to say that many of these tracks land and many don’t. Interestingly, MTBMB serves as Em’s most trap influenced project yet. It seems hypocritical from a conceptual standpoint to ride trap beats and feature Juice WRLD and Young M.A, after you spent virtually two years of your career becoming the self proclaimed mumble rap destroyer, but at this point what else can we expect from Eminem? This album features songs about gun control and jokes about the Ariana Grande concert bombing, it’s easy to say that Em’s forte has never been consistency. On the topic of those tracks however, “Darkness” is a very impressive moment on the project and just one example of the amazing story telling all over this thing. The vividly depicted story lines all over this project are effectively my favorite part of the album and very reminiscent of his old work. To name a few “Darkness”, “Stepdad” and “Those Kinda Nights” all feature story lines described perfectly enough to where they feel like short films (ignoring the fact that 2/3 of those hooks are terrible). There are plenty of moments here that could have been scrapped and it’s length ends up being it’s own worst enemy. For me the album could have ended with the song “Stepdad’, and been one of Slim’s best projects to date. Until Em releases something more focussed and condensed it’s hard for me to say that he is back to where he once was, but MTBMB has a lot of good tracks and is certainly a step in the right direction.