Album: Yelawolf, Radioactive (Shady/Interscope)

Eminem's protegé Yelawolf is like a Southern country cousin of Marshall Mathers himself, with similar trailer-trash sensibilities transferred from some Detroit freeway-underpass ghetto to a rubbish-strewn clearing in the Alabama backwoods.

When Yelawolf depicts his home life as one of "big trucks in the yard, big bucks on the wall", he's not talking about money, but deer from drunken hunting trips. Otherwise, it's pretty much the same stories in a different accent: grim tableaux of abuse like "Growin' Up in the Gutter" mixed with banging club anthems, assertions of loose morality, lascivious lustings for a girl as criminal as Yelawolf himself, and a couple of token socio-political deprecations by the self-professed "Slumerican". But it seems such a huge effort being expended to achieve so little.

DOWNLOAD THIS Radioactive Introduction; Growin' Up in the Gutter