We’ve known Mike Skinner for a while now; he’s befriended all of us through The Streets and we’ve come to love him and his penchant for weed inspired homemade beats and quasi-poetic storytelling, so in a way the knowledge that this is his final album as The Streets feels a little like hearing one of your friends is moving abroad.
That’s not to say that he has a spotless back-catalogue; the last two albums were rather hit and miss affairs that meandered away from the urban-British storytelling that Skinner is so good at. 'Computers and Blues' however, combines the raw lyrical brilliance of the first two albums with the more polished sound he developed later in his career.
 The album starts with a classic Streets ode to insular stoner life, with the kind of lyrics that most city-dwelling British 20-somethings will find all too familiar. Lines like “Weed makes me not want to be in new places fight it! / Stare at the same T.V. watching the torrent; like it” remind us why we love The Streets so much: Skinner’s ability to neatly put into words the things we do every day.
‘Without Thinking’, the fifth track on the album, is the psychological opposite of the first track: “I’ll go out without a blink / I’ll go downtown without thinking and shout over a drink”. It’s the weekend to the first track’s weekday evening, but while the two tracks may be opposites, they are also at their core dealing with the same subject – urban British life; The Streets could well be used as a case study in that subject in years to come.
Other stand out tracks are 'Going Through Hell', a balls-out guitar based anthem, which I can already hear being sung off-key in bars across the UK, 'Puzzled by People', a laid back tune dealing with the mental maze that is everyday interactions with other human beings, and finally 'Lock the Locks', which is Skinner revelling in his final farewell as the streets – “I’m packing up my desk/ Put it into boxes/ Knock out the lights/ Lock the locks and leave/ I’ll leave one evening, and be seen off by a party for my parting in a bar”.
This final tune sums up the mood of the album. It is one last hurrah, a farewell party in which The Streets return to what The Streets does best: painting a picture of the life Skinner, and the rest of us lead in urban Britain.
And so the Streets come to an end, Skinner bows out on a high, and it feels like coming to the end of a great novel, a novel that I will certainly be re-reading over and over again.
Stereoboard Album Rating: 9/10
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