Rebirth Review

It is worth saying that the impulse behind it is not contemptible. He genuinely loved the guitar, played it badly and constantly, and wanted to make something outside the machine that had made him rich. What arrived is a set of songs built on the most exhausted rock textures available in 2009, chugging distortion and canned drums, with a voice pushed through so much processing that the personality is gone.

Prom Queen is the low point, a revenge fantasy set to a riff that would embarrass a covers band. Drop the World survives only because of the guest verse. On Fire has a shred of a melody and is drowned. There is no groove anywhere on the record, which is fatal, because groove was the one thing his rap albums never lacked. Delayed repeatedly and released to universal bafflement, it remains the clearest case in modern rap of an artist being told no by nobody.