Ever since his groundbreaking record of 2001,
Original Pirate Material, Mike Skinner - a.k.a. The Streets - has carved himself a niche in the UK music scene; a coalescence of garage, hip hop and grime has created the idiosyncratic Streets vibe. He's yet to waver much from his well-traversed course, and it's more of the same on 'Everything Is Borrowed', the title track to his fourth studio album. The beats, however, do hark back to the songs on his debut, and judging by this song alone, it seems he's moving away from the emotionally dark and heavy aesthetic of his previous release, 2006's
The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living.
On his
MySpace page, the rapper said: "This album started off life as parables but then I realised that itmight get a bit cheesy so I got rid of the alien song and the devilsong and replaced them with more straight up songs. I've pretty muchkept my promise that I made to myself not to reference modern life onany of them though which is hard to do and keep things personal at thesame time."
Interestingly, Skinner's looking ahead to his fifth album, which he says will be his answer to Lou Reed's
Berlin. Whoa! It's tentatively called
Computers and Blues and will probably not see the light of day for close to two years. It's also reported to be the final Streets album, and one that will contain only live musicians and no samples.
Everything Is Borrowed is due for release here this month. But while you're waiting, check out the video for the first single.