The Streets - Computers And Blues

08 February, 2011
Written by Richard Seddon

So, it’s the end of the road for The Streets. Sorry, I’m really sorry, I just couldn’t help but open with that line. Forgive me. Mike Skinner felt as if he’d reached a cul de sac in his career. Sorry. I’ll get on with it. No more dodgy puns. Promise. The point is Skinner’s calling an end to a five-album career and it’s probably the right time to call last orders. This farewell album, Computers And Blues, sees glimmers of brilliance but also repetition and in Skinner’s own words is ‘dancing music to drink tea to,’ although not at the same time - Tetleys on the dance floor is just plain dangerous.

By now you know what to expect from The Streets, there are no dramatic surprises or a change from the norm here. Mike Skinner has a knack of being a musical Karl Pilkington – he’ll say something and your immediate reaction is ‘What? You idiot,’ then after a few minutes thinking about it you realise he’s got a point, minutes later it’s an accepted truth and before you know it you’re a fan. Lyrics on Computers and Blues range from the high school/ it has to rhyme no matter how absurd: ‘Frank Bruno’s Nose has seen too many blows’ (‘We Can Never Be Friends’) to the laughably familiar: ‘You can’t Google the solutions to people’s feelings,’ well, I laughed, finding it all too familiar. Sometimes I think life would be a lot easier if people’s words came with error codes – pop it into Google and see what she’s really upset about. Well all of that is put into the track ‘Puzzled by People’.

‘We Can Never Be Friends’ falls short of the brilliance of ‘Dry Your Eyes’ and is a poor carbon copy of its predecessor. ‘OMG’ made me laugh, sorry it made me LOL. It’s a modern love story packed full of modern references, the lyrics tell the story of a boy looking through a girl’s Facebook page and his feelings when he sees her relationship in ‘plain Helvetica’, I do like a man who can crowbar the name a font into a song’s lyrics. It’s a happy ending BTW (LOL), he ends up ‘in a relationship’ with the very girl whose Facebook page he was trawling for photos like some crazed stalker.

‘Trust Me’ is an infectious groove of homemade beats featuring the lyric, ‘I see Alice in Wonderland, I see malice in Sunderland’ another one that made me chuckle. The one thing Mike Skinner took from school was the time his English teacher told him that poetry had to rhyme.

The album bows out with ‘Lock the Locks’, which is as laid back as it gets. He talks about tidying up his desk and packing up the boxes with a fondness for his musical project. The lyrics also refer to the most annoying thing on Earth – when someone tells you about a dream and they say, ‘I was with you, only it wasn’t you... I was in my house, only it wasn’t my house,’ perhaps only to be overtaken by the times when someone insists on telling you all about a TV program that you didn’t watch because YOU DON’T LIKE IT!!! THAT’S WHY YOU DIDN’T WATCH IT!!!

Sorry.

So, no surprises here, if you like The Streets you’ll like it, I realise what a daft comment that is to make. It’ll make you chuckle, cringe and dance, but not while drinking tea.

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