Recovery Review

He wanted to make something clear eyed after the accents and the pills and he got there, but the setting he chose flattens him. The beats are loud, mid tempo and generic, mixed to compete on radio with everything else in 2010, and the guest choruses are all in the same key of uplift. Not Afraid means what it says and says it in the most predictable available way.

Love the Way You Lie has a chorus that carried the record around the world and a subject it handles with less care than the same man handled it a decade earlier. Underneath, the rapping starts turning into a sport, faster and denser without a joke or a story to hang it on. There is a real album in Going Through Changes and Talkin 2 Myself, where he admits to envy and to almost giving up. It is the sound of a serious recovery and a boring record, at the same time.