The more the triumphs of Eminem’s world beating Slim Shady/Marshall Mathers/Eminem Show trilogy recede into memory, the more each subsequent release struggles to strike a tone that leverages an audience raised on the crass iconoclasm of “My Name Is” and “Kill You” with the aging, now sober father of three behind the music. As such, Em’s last decade worth of albums has suffered under jarring shifts in tone. After showing his first signs of wear with 2004’s patchy Encore, Eminem rebounded with 2009’s Dre-beats-and-horrorcore-rhymes retrenchment Relapse. Relapse sold well but its serial killer shtick was uninspired, as Eminem openly admitted on the next year’s “Not Afraid” (“That last Relapse CD was ‘enh’”). 2010’s Recovery maneuvered out of Relapse and Encore’s chum bucket humor by detailing the artist’s struggle to overcome a long-simmering prescription drug dependency. Serious Eminem proved a drag despite Recovery couching its penitent 12-step dispatches in rivulets of the usual Slim Shady chicanery, so here we are staring down a once-more radioactive blonde Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP 2.

The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is an album-length bout of moral recidivism, Recovery’s motivational rehab narrative ditched wholesale for a second helping of the celeb-hating, self-deprecating juvenalia of Eminem’s beloved third album peppered with samples of and references to the source material. Opener “Bad Guy” is a sprawling epic that finds the brother of “Stan”’s titular obsessed fan hatching an elaborate revenge plot, and “Parking Lot” inexplicably revisits the heist in the middle of “Criminal” to inform us that the getaway driver split, and the shooter died. “Rap God” revisits a crass joke about the 1999 Columbine school shooting initially censored on the first LP’s “I’m Back”. Old nemeses like Insane Clown Posse, Everlast, and the Backstreet Boys are lampooned as well. But MMLP2 revisits more than just the characters and stories of the first installment. It also revels in its predecessor’s worst behaviors, bandying about misogyny and gay slurs as if Eminem’s conciliatory 2001 Grammys performance with a pink polka dot suited Elton John never happened.

“Rap God” is a gobstopping display of Eminem’s champion technical prowess that’s waylaid in every verse by brazen homophobia. “Love Game”, the hotly anticipated team up with Kendrick Lamar, is similarly assailed by lunkheaded chauvinism, both in Eminem’s gross rendition of a woman giving him oral sex and Kendrick’s barbs about a guy who “drowned like an abortion” and a clingy ex for whom “chlamydia couldn’t even get rid of her.” Elsewhere two songs are dedicated to crucifying the mother of his children and anyone else foolhardy enough to get involved with him. (“Bitch, you complain when you listen to this/ But you throw yourself at me/ That’s what I call pitching a bitch.”) Earlier in his career, Eminem delivered similarly gutbucket content with the shock of incredulity that anyone would find it offensive. It was an error of youthful carelessness. But in 2013, in the wake of the message of redemption he feverishly pitched us just an album ago, Eminem’s return to ruffling feathers carries the stink of desperation.

The only salvation for a lot of these songs is Eminem’s alchemical control of rhyme and diction, but even that can be a liability. Thirteen years after the original Marshall Mathers LP, the grating cadence-over-substance ethos of “The Way I Am”, once a stilted outlier on an album packed with otherwise limber wordplay, has now become the rule. “Legacy” pulls all manner of cockamamie pronunciation gymnastics just so Eminem can end every line with the same rhyming syllables, and the song’s decision to dispense with proper word accents and splay sentences haphazardly across the middle of lines makes for a flow that comes across overwrought and labored even as it plays Frankenstein with conventional word choice and rhyme patterns. Filler words frequently clutter lines just to make the rhymes look more dazzling, and in the process we end up with well-executed but empty lines like “I been driving around your side of this town like nine frickin’ hours and forty five minutes now” from “Bad Guy” and “The day you beat me pigs’ll fly out of my ass in a saucer full of Italian sausages” on “Legacy”. Play half of these songs alongside even the clunkiest Marshall Mathers LP cut, and the god of rap’s powers appear noticeably diminished.

MMLP2 does step out from under the shadow of its predecessor in its choice of collaborators. Dr. Dre sits this one out, appearing as an executive producer but steering clear of any actual grunt work. In his place we get a spate of productions from Eminem himself (often aided by pop heavyweights like Alex da Kid and Emile) alongside a newly in-demand Rick Rubin. MMLP2’s production mostly hews toward the expected stadium rap sounds, but the Rubin cuts award the album a measure of old school rap-rock flair. Unfortunately what sounded like invention for the 1986 Beastie Boys often plays like butt rock in the hands of 2013 Eminem. “Berzerk” turns Billy Squier’s “The Stroke” into questionable back-to-basics posturing, and “So Far…” grinds Joe Walsh’s winding 1978 epic “Life’s Been Good” and Schoolly D’s “P.S.K. (What Does It Mean?)” into fodder for Eminem’s middle-aged finger-waving. (“Fuck I gotta do to hear this new song from Luda, be an expert at computers?”) “Rhyme or Reason” cleverly flips the “What’s your name?/ Who’s your daddy?” refrain from the Zombies’ “Time of the Season” into a tongue-lashing for an absentee father, and “Love Game” makes good use of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders’ “The Game of Love”, sexist lyrical putrefaction aside, but by and large, Eminem and Rubin are not a match.

Eminem is a titan with wordplay, but MMLP2 once again finds him at a loss for how to apply his talents. For three albums in the early aughts he devilishly rewrote the rules of pop music to shoehorn hip-hop into the national spotlight, but here he’s winded, struggling to keep up with modern pop conventions, genuflecting to trap on “Rap God” and EDM on “The Monster”, dragging his biggest competitor Kendrick into one of the worst songs of his young career, and soldering on hooks from singers of varying anonymity wherever applicable to ensure this patchwork monstrosity is too big to fail, all of this under the guise of a return to form, his second in three albums. Eminem’s too talented a rapper with too good a Rolodex for this to flop, but damned if Marshall Mathers LP 2 doesn’t give it a go. The lesson here, if there’s one to be gleaned from this 80 minutes of cold, clinical lyrical acrobatics, is that rap sequels are a lot like trying on old prom clothes: chance one if you dare, but the only thing you’re liable to display is how much you’ve let yourself go since your glory days.