In case you hadn’t noticed or have been living under a rock recently, Eminem‘s ‘Marshall Mathers LP 2’ will be out this week. It will be his eighth studio album after two 90s records ‘Infinite’ and ‘The Slim Shady LP’, 2000’s ‘The Marshall Mathers LP’ and 2001’s ‘Devil’s Night’, ‘The Eminem Show’ in 2002 and from 2004-2010 he churned out rhymes over four LPs ‘D12 World’, ‘Encore’, ‘Relapse’ and ‘Recovery’. He’s been working on his latest offering since May last year when he announced it, and on first listen, the 16-track release is a pretty strong follow-up to his last full-length that featured tunes like ‘Love The Way You Lie’, ‘Not Afraid’ and ‘No Love’.

For the most part, that is.

Comparing this album to his last – which I think is the most appropriate thing to do in determining where he’s at now as he goes through his 41st year on Earth – he’s called on more legitimate collaborations with Skylar Grey, fun.‘s Nate Ruess, Kendrick Lamar and Rihanna (even though she was on ‘Recovery’ too) rather than Kobe, Slaughterhouse, and the two biggest duds on the planet P!nk and Lil’ Wayne. But the unpleasant sound of Eminem rapping in a Yoda voice over a ‘Time Of The Season’ sample does not work, and spitting over a repetitive rap-rock guitar lick in ‘So Far∑’ doesn’t bring much to the album either. Not to mention the part of ‘Love Game’ where we hear a mid-blowjob woman alternating words with slurps.

Nonetheless, it still has some beautiful parts that seem to sneak into most of his albums.

Dubbed the most ‘shocking’ song of his career, Eminem‘s collaboration with Nate Ruess in ‘Headlights’ is the moment where he finally apologises to his mother after countless dissing raps. His whole career has reflected the complicated relationship between the rapper’s on-record alter-egos and his personal life, and the title ‘Headlights’ refers to their last meeting: as she drove away, he became fixated on the headlights of her car as he coped with feelings of “overwhelming sadness”, he raps. He offers a mature, sincere apology to his mum Debbie Mathers, continuously referring to his regret for “Cleaning Out the Closet” in which he called her a “selfish bitch” who he hoped would burn in hell.

He says in the opening lyrics “I went in headfirst, never thinking about who what I said hurt … My mom probably got it the worst”, and he also expresses regret that his mother has not been involved in her children’s lives while also referring to his younger brother Nathan’s removal to foster care. It reminds us of previous older tunes like ‘Space Bound’, ‘Stan’ and countless others that convey his deeper emotional side, and is a welcome break as track number 6 on the record after the aggressive ‘Asshole’, ‘Berzerk’ and ‘Brainless’.

The veteran’s copped a lot of non-support from major outlets like FACT and Stereogum who have labelled the album as “soggy, bilious, rancid, way too impressed with itself”, a “tiring listen” and have dubbed the rapper as “a sad echo of a long-dead self” in relation to his efforts on the record. But while I agree that it’s likely ‘Marshall Mathers LP 2’ will be his last full-length as it certainly doesn’t explode with hits that he seemingly used to create effortlessly (‘Lose Yourself’ etc.), I still feel that the record is an entertaining listen; an appropriate conclusion to his career and certainly not a failed attempt at reviving the dream. His rapping in the appropriately-titled ‘Rap God’ is insane; he goes quicker and more flawlessly than ever before and his Rihanna collab ‘The Monster’ is a solid round 2 to ‘Love The Way You Lie’.

Some articles circulating the Internet at the moment flogging Eminem‘s effort are a bit premature; they fail to recognise that, like all things music, sounds change and you’ll be hard-pressed to find an artist who’s released eight albums and maintained the same sound the whole way through. Let’s be honest, 90s hip-hop will (sadly) never properly return and I find it strange to hear people rating other mediocre 2013 hip-hop albums higher than this because it doesn’t sound “90s”. Jay Z‘s inspiration in ‘Magna Carta’ (does he even know what the Magna Carta was?) comes from the boring, material subjects that now make up his life, while Marshall is finishing off his career in a mature way – apologising for his younger days of wrongdoing and admitting that maybe “he took it too far”.

He’s 41, and sure, you think that’d be old enough to have reconciled some of the issues that featured on his early albums. But I don’t think it’s fair to call the album the “sound of an over-the-hill star trying to prove himself one last time, grasping for sources of inspiration that are no longer there”. Yep, there are some serious album low-points – like I mentioned before – but for the most part the record is a fantastic evaluation of an incredibly controversial career. While I think there’s more positive things to take from it than negative, I do admit to hoping this will be his last hurrah albeit believing he did it in tremendous fashion.

Maybe it’ll just take others more than one album rotation to hear its power in full-force, and obviously everybody will have different opinions on the record, but coming from somebody whose daily life is largely vested in finding and critiquing new music, I think many have simply been too quick to brush aside the possibility of Eminem maintaining success. He hasn’t become “a clumsy writer, an overexplainer” – but even if he has, I think that’s what made him outstanding to begin with.