Recovery

I briefly touched on this a few posts ago and debated long and hard about doing a post on it, but after many many hours of listening I really don't think my few sentences really did it justice.  If you like great music, you need to purchase, if you haven't already, Eminem's Recovery album.  It is one of the best CDs I've ever listened to, I have literally, without exaggeration listened to the CD roughly 20 times, beginning to end, since I bought it.  It is that good. 

He's still a little angry don't get me wrong, but it's a much much much more mature sound, more focused and, for lack of a better way to say it, a "smarter" album.  The anger is more channeled into the lyrics and it makes for some pretty mesmerizing flows.  The whole CD is a journey, starting with addressing his best friends death (Proof) to apologizing for his last CDs which were, frankly a mess, due to his issues with drugs and booze, which he also touches on a lot.  The maturity comes through in that there's no "gimmick" song on the album, which I truly appreciate.  There's no Slim Shady or Made You, no MTV costume "funny" song.  Everything is raw and you can tell there is a lot of passion behind each and every lyric that leaves his mouth.  For example, below is probably my favorite phrase on the whole CD:

Fuck catching lightning, He struck it

Screamed shut up at thunder,

Flipped the world upside down and made it rain upward

That's one of many amazing flows, but probably my favorite, and it's in my favorite song, Cinderella Man.  The video for Love the Way you lie is pretty brilliant too, Megan Fox and a Hobbit, it's great.  I know I've gone WAY over the top here but trust me when I say the CD is that good.  A friend once asked me if I could only have 3 CDs to listen to for the rest of forever, Recovery was one of my 3. (Michael Jackson's Bad and Journey's Greatest Hits were the other 2 if you are interested.)