On 2006’s The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living, Mike Skinner invited us to drink deep of his mid-career crisis. Suddenly famous, and with a new weight of expectation resting on his skinny white shoulders, The Streets frontman was giving voice to that lamest of third abum cliches, the moaning rock star: he rapped about sleeping with starlets and splurging all his money on blow with the dewy-eyed self-pity of a starving singer-songwriter recently dumped by his girlfriend. Sensing the public’s patience for mewling millionaires could be pushed only too far, Skinner takes the opposite tack on LP number four: Everything Is Borrowed is calculatingly whine-free, with lyrics that seem chiefly concerned with probing Deep Questions (on his blog, Skinner announced the project would not reference modern life in any way). Alas, such ruminations are accompanied by some of the hoariest beats Skinner’s ever written: the title-track skates on a relentlessly bouncy groove, seeking to pummel into submission with its overpowering chipperness; ‘Heaven For The Weather’ is so relentlessly jaunty it may well bring on a migraine. He’s still trying to write another ‘Dry Your Eyes’, too (didn’t he do that already, on ‘Never Been To Church’?). Here the law of diminishing returns is most apparent: ‘The Way Of The Dodo’ is a would be shout-out to the post-Live Earth generation – alas its sentiments (global warming bad, being nice to animals good) are as hopelessly gloopy as the Elton John-does-Disney choral backing. Skinner’s early albums were full of geezerish-hustle and gritty observational wisecracks. But Everything Is Borrowed is queasily sincere and maniacally upbeat, a gushing self-help travelogue trading on borrowed profundity and hackneyed wisdom. Didn’t anyone think to tell Skinner – British hip-hop is no country for old zen?
Key track: ‘Everything Is Borrowed’