The Streets: The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Mike Skinner, the English producer-rapper who calls himself the Streets, debuted four years ago with a blessedly original album that mixed darting two-step beats with deft, cockney-voiced rhymes about gray-skied suburbs and PlayStation addicts. He followed that up with a sparer concept record about a week in the life of a drunken lout. Skinner's new album is a Behind the Music episode converted into a diffuse, rave-schooled song cycle, with increasingly skittery beats framing autobiographical tales about paranoid cocaine binges and Skinner's dead father. Skinner is still a singular rhymer, mixing up soused spluttering, jokey asides and change-on-a-dime rhythm patterns with witty narrative detail on "War of the Sexes" and "When You Wasn't Famous," a dancehall-flavored banger about hooking up with an unnamed pop star of greater renown. Skinner's a lovable lout with a tender side, and if he's no longer pushing the envelope, that's understandable: It sounds like he needed to get his sprawling, drug-soaked confessional record out of his system.