The Streets - 'Everything Is Borrowed'
Once again, things are changing around Mike Skinner. He's done the modern-day guttersnipe poet thing, he's done the concept album thing, he's done the "Fame = Hell" thing, and now we find him trying to make contact with the universal themes which govern all people.
Even if this wasn't apparent in his lyrics, you'd still get it because he has taken to using an orchestra in his new material. Orchestras aren't here for the little, mundane things in life, you see. You'll never heard an opera about a plumber changing a tap, for example, unless it's the beer-tap in Valhalla itself, and the future of mankind depends on Thor whetting his whistle before the sun goes down.
Having spent ages writing, scoring and recording his orchestra, it's only natural that mixmaster Mike would then cut and splice it into loops and fragments. That's what he does with language, after all. With the Streets, you don't tend to get perfectly-weighted, tumbledown rhythmical flow, or sentences which are spoken the way you or I might talk if we were chatting over a cuppa.
What you get is a stream of words which buzzes around the point, like a wasp over a picnic. Sometimes he is very clear, sometimes he is not. His words twitch and dart off to one side, or stop suddenly, or run veryveryfastandthencrrrraaaassssshhhhhhhh.
This gadding about, lyrically, can lead people to conclude that he's not actually very good, but you underestimate Mike Skinner at your peril. He's got theories about life, you see, and has a knack for throwing together a memorable expression - "I love the rain on my scars" is the kind of line you can spend DAYS thinking about.
The fact that it is sometimes followed by a line that you can't quite hear on first listen, or one which doesn't go quite the way you might expect, given what has gone before, only forces everyone to concentrate harder. And that is what the cut-up orchestra is all about. Why make everything seamless? Surely you lose people if they don't feel that they have to put any effort into listening?
Or to put it another way, perfection is overrated, change is eternal, Streets = Smashing, and someone needs to get Thor some pork scratchings.
Download: Out now
CD Released: September 29th
(Fraser McAlpine)
PS: There's a bit towards the middle where Mike says "And then I'll have had it with roaming", which for a while I thought was "And then I'll have had it with Ronan". It works either way, really.
Comment number 1.
At 23rd Sep 2008, WinstonsZen wrote:LOL!!!
I also heard that as "I've had it with Ronan"!
Brought a wry smile to my lips!
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