Computers and Blues
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”.
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,…
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 .
“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
One for the road from the Streets. <strong>Paul MacInnes</strong> has mixed feelings
Skinner has manfully swum against the tide of rap’s machismo with 'Computers and Blues'. Rating: * * * *