Eminem's 'Relapse'

Eminem is one psychopath who really knows his place. To promote "Relapse," his first album in more than four years, the 36-year-old rap superstar and self-styled "Satan in black satin panties" is appearing in a special edition of the Marvel comic "The Punisher," now available online; with baby Stewie from "Family Guy" as the animated host of the Fox Network's Sunday cartoon block, and in his own iPhone game based on the Dario Argento-style bloodfest that is the video for "3 a.m." -- his latest hit, in which he portrays himself escaping from a rehabilitation facility, gobbling pills, murdering several random victims and masturbating while watching "Hannah Montana."

None of this is new territory for Eminem. He's turned himself into a cartoon before, played many rounds of rotisserie murder and been glorified by critics (yes, me too) for turning shock into art. He's also taken on various identities to put a little distance between the trailer-park misfit born Marshall Mathers and the antiheroes who do the grotesque deeds he describes in his rhymes.

Eminem himself is a fiction, the most sympathetic of Mathers' criminal minds. That character is often victimized himself; on "Relapse," he recalls a childhood during which he was both raped by his stepfather and forced to eat food his mother laced with pills. (Both incidents are played for laughs.) Then there's the slobbery pervert Ken Kaniff, who resurfaces in his role as keeper of Mathers' homophobic anxieties. And, of course, there's Slim Shady, the jokester reminiscent of the Joker -- when Eminem raps about falling asleep as a stoned child, clutching a "Heath Ledger bobblehead," he's simultaneously taking an improper jab at the deceased actor and crediting him as a kindred spirit.

What's different about "Relapse" is that Mathers lets himself slip in, in new ways. Clean and sober after many years of drug addiction, he could have fully centered this comeback album on his real-life nightmare, creating a semiautobiographical work in the spirit of his Oscar-winning film "8 Mile."

Packed with images of its maker bingeing on brand-name pharmaceuticals, "Relapse" is a drug album as dark as Neil Young's "Tonight's the Night." Some of its strongest images chronicle not mayhem, but real pain: Mathers falling asleep while stuffing himself on junk food, his worried daughter nearby; or digging in the couch for pills and licking the dust out of bottles; or muttering, "I need something to pull me out of this dump."