• HIP-HOP

EMINEM

Relapse

Aftermath

** ½

As the sound of flatulence emits on We Made You, Eminem's first big single after a four-year hiatus, the rapper born as Marshall Mathers says ``you think that's bad, you should hear the rest of my album.''

Indeed, the playful celebrity-ribbing song, which is rapped in a faux British accent and represents the worst of what Eminem had become before he vanished from the spotlight, is an anomaly on his fifth studio album for Aftermath Records.

Relapse, which is out on Tuesday, is Slim Shady's darkest, most demented and sadistic release yet. No subject is taboo, from incest (Insane) and cold-blooded murder (Same Song & Dance) to abusing and mocking deceased actor Christopher Reeve (Medicine Ball).

Eminem's cohort on his devilish journey is Dr. Dre, who provides keyboard symphonies with pounding piano chords and horror movie strings. The catchy Crack a Bottle, which features Dre and 50 Cent, is the best song any of the three have made in years.

Fans of his early work will be pleased by tracks like 3 a.m., Stay Wide Awake, and Deja Vu, in which he uses his daft wordplay to paint vivid images of drug-induced stupors.

But Relapse ultimately suffers from repetition. Dre's beats tend to be continuous loops, and Eminem, although improving from the childish antics of his mediocre 2004 album Encore, has become a caricature of his Slim Shady personality, resorting to shock value in order to outdo all the outrageous (and hopefully fictional) claims he makes.

-- ADRIAN RUHI

aruhi@MiamiHerald.com

CIARA

Fantasy Ride

LaFace

***

Ciara's brand of seductive R&B is so highly developed that the formula of silky synths, midtempo beats and breathy vocals can be applied to practically anything and still sound hot.

All that makes Fantasy Ride a pretty smooth one, especially with superstar collaborators, including Justin Timberlake, Missy Elliott, Ludacris and The-Dream, helping her out. Love Sex Magic is the sweetest confection Timberlake has been a part of in years, while still drawing some fierce vocals out of Ciara. The pretty Never Ever, which is built around the Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes' classic If You Don't Know Me by Now, finds a perfect foil in Young Jeezy, who roughs things up with his rhymes.

Even when Ciara is copping some of the grooves of her contemporaries -- like the Beyonce-influenced G Is for Girl, the Pussycat Dolls-y High Price and the Britney Spears-ish Pucker Up -- she still manages to make it work. And maybe all that success leads to a little bit of overconfidence in the formula -- thinking it can save such half-baked ideas as Ciara to the Stage, with its lists and a chorus of simply repeating the title, and the tortured metaphor of Like a Surgeon, which is not a Weird Al Yankovic remake.

While Ciara doesn't really cover any new ground on Fantasy Ride, the ground she's been mining for three albums is still so fertile that she doesn't really have to. At this point, the hits seem to just grow themselves.

-- GLENN GAMBOA

Newsday

PATRICK WATSON

Wooden Arms

Secret City

***

Patrick Watson's compositions are deceptively simple. His voice hovers around the mystical midpoint between Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Antony & the Johnsons' Antony Hegarty. And on Wooden Arms , both of those gifts complement each other, leading to the Cajun-tinged country of Big Bird in a Small Cage and the wild, piano-driven Beijing that bounces between a Philip Glass piece and a Kid A -era Radiohead cut.

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