Mike Skinner’s previous two albums, The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living and Everything Is Borrowed, were afforded such lukewarm receptions that it’s easy to forget that his 2002 debut as The Streets, Original Pirate Material, found him being hailed as nothing less than the future of music. He followed it up with the commercial smash A Grand Don’t Come For Free, before seeming to lose the plot with the aforementioned The Hardest Way..., which saw Skinner trading in his trademark gritty urban lyrics in favour of lamenting the downside of fame and fortune.
Skinner has stated that Computers and Blues will be the final Streets album because he’s “sick of the name and its connotations” – well, he’s not the only one, to judge by his steadily declining sales. If anything, Computers and Blues confirms that The Streets were a bit of a one-trick pony, with the garage and dubstep rhythms that seemed so innovative a decade ago feeling rather dated in 2011, especially when placed alongside the likes of Burial, Kode 9, The Joker and the Hyperdub axis.
The album kicks off with ‘Outside Inside’, which finds Skinner rapping about dope-induced lethargy over a hum-drum dubstep beat. There’s precious little improvement on the single ‘Going Through Hell’, a track built around a bombastic sampled guitar riff; Skinner reels off a pedestrian lyric about staying positive in the face of adversity and so on, and matters aren’t helped by the grating vocals of Robert Harvey, formerly of indie also-rans The Music.
Computers And Blues largely continues in this vein, with the likes of ‘Roof Of Your Car’, ‘Blip On A Screen’ and ‘OMG’ proving to be uninspired garage workouts lacking melodic and rhythmic finesse. By far and away the best track is ‘Trust Me’, an irresistible slice of funky electro with a vintage Skinner lyric about the sturm und drang of modern urban life.
Regrettably, it’s but an island of quality in a sea of mediocrity. Now that he’s free from the stylistic straightjacket of The Streets, let’s hope Skinner’s next musical project, whatever form it takes, will find him once again scaling the heights of Original Pirate Material.