Computers and Blues

AlbumJan 01 / 201114 songs, 43m 30s
UK Hip Hop
Popular

Mike Skinner’s decade-long recording career as The Streets—always envisioned, by him, as a boxset-like, finite body of work—comes to something like a close with this experimental, valedictory fifth album. But *Computers and Blues* doesn’t merely offer a victory lap revival of the geezer rap confessionals that Skinner made his name with. Or even, for that matter, the wholesale lump-in-throat emotion you might expect from a farewell (the glitchy, fatherhood-themed “Blip On a Screen” notwithstanding). Instead, what Skinner crafts is an unpredictable, living synthesis of all his previous styles; 14 maximalist tracks that barrel thrillingly from the aggro glam rock of “Going Through Hell” to the wistful, tower block romance of “Roof of Your Car”.

5.7 / 10

D+

Mike Skinner’s uneasy relationship with his Streets creation has been evident since 2006’s The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living, a paranoid pitfalls-of-celebrity album that predicted the New Age retreat of 2008’s Everything Is Borrowed. Much of that can probably be attributed to Skinner’s milieu—pub-crawls,…

5.9 / 10

However, his fifth studio LP, Computers and Blues, his last to be recorded under the guise of the Streets, sees him return to his more popular "everyman" persona again on a concept album that perhaps captures the Zeitgeist just as much as his first two celebrated efforts.

It's been ten years now that Birmingham-born Mike Skinner released the debut with his mates as The Streets .

7 / 10

“You can’t Google the solutions to people’s problems” reasons Mike Skinner on ‘Puzzled By People’, the truth behind the everyman introspection he’s spent years conducting suddenly dawnin

8 / 10

7 / 10

One for the road from the Streets. <strong>Paul MacInnes</strong> has mixed feelings

Album Reviews: The Streets - Computers And Blues

65 %

1.5 / 5

The Streets - Computers And Blues review: Skinner and disappointment

Skinner has manfully swum against the tide of rap’s machismo with 'Computers and Blues'. Rating: * * * *

4 / 10