Time to say goodbye
Baby-faced beatmaker Mike Skinner can work magic with a rhyme. On Computers and Blues’ first track, he raps: “The world is outside but inside warm, inside informal, outside stormy, inside normal.” Unfortunately, the man behind The Streets takes his iambic leaning too far sometimes, and his latest—and final—album showcases this tendency.
He becomes downright Seussian on “Roof of Your Car,” saying “I wish on a star, I wish for a bar with a cigar.” “Abc,” meanwhile, is brought to you by Elmo gone hip-hop with the declaration “A: You can’t say what you B, I don’t see what you C,” and so on, sadly, to Z. It’s not all bad: “Lock the Locks” says a heartfelt goodbye, while “Blip On A Screen” is a poignant hymn to an unborn child. And Skinner is nothing if not self-aware, but lacerating analogies—“like the bad taste leaking from the ink in my pen”—don’t make up for mediocre beats or the line “You can’t Google the solution to people’s feelings.” Overall, Skinner sounds bored and tired of himself—in short, ready to move on.