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Cornerstone Digital
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Date Posted: 12:01:59 05/06/04 Thu
Author Host/IP: adsl-64-108-84-224.dsl.akrnoh.ameritech.net/64.108.84.224
THE NEW ALBUM- A Grand Donšt Come For Free
In stores May 18 on VICE Records
The Streets' first album , 2002's Brit Award and Mercury Prize nominated Original Pirate Material, was a brilliantly witty and original snapshot of 21st century reality. It was also the next step forward for the great tradition of British pop songwriting, which stretches from The Who and The Kinks, to Madness and The Specials, to Blur and Pulp. And a record with the power to unite the disparate tribes of UK dance music - the ravers, the hip-hop heads, the garagistas - in heartfelt appreciation of the joy and pain of the queue for a late-night kebab.
But the appeal of Original Pirate Material didn't stop at the English Channel. The Streets' infectious honesty ("You think I'm ghetto? Stop dreaming") and snappily homespun production techniques have struck a chord with sharp-eared listeners all around the world, to the extent that the
album has so far sold more than a million copies - reaching audiences as far afield as Brazil and Japan, and going top 30 in the US.
Two years on, with a whole new generation of sharp-tongued UK MC's (from Dizzee Rascal to Lady Sovereign) paying tribute to his influence, Mike Skinner is back. And within the first five seconds of his new single "Fit But You Know It" - a riotous celebration of package-holiday mating rituals destined to cause carnage on Europe's dancefloors (All together now: "I reckon you're about an eight or a nine, maybe even a nine and a half in four beers' time") - it's already clear that he's come up with a worthy successor to Original Pirate Material. A Grand Don't Come For Free was made in exactly the same way as its illustrious predecessor. That is, with Skinner working mostly at home, "supplying his own samples" (for example that savage glam-punk guitar on "Fit But You Know It" is not some horribly mangled offshoot of David Bowie's "Jean Genie", it's Mike riffing it up on a borrowed Fender Telecaster), and friends coming back from the pub to contribute occasional background mayhem.
Beneath the bubbling stream-of-consciousness lyrics for which he is justifiably renowned ("and I'm thinkin'... and I'm thinkin..."), The Streets' uniquely rough-edged production continues to rearrange the building blocks of the last fifteen years of dance music into bold and unexpected new shapes. Acid's random bleeps, the euphoric piano sound of Italian House, Jungle's spiraling sub-bass, Trance's psychotropic drum surge, UK Garage's sexy string stabs: they're all in here somewhere, just in a very different order to the one they originally evolved in.
Listen to A Grand Don't Come For Free for the first time on the bus home or taking a sick dog to the vet's, and all the little details will seep into your mind the same way sherry flavours a trifle. But put it on through headphones in the early hours of the morning and a whole imaginative new
world opens up. Just as it did on first hearing Massive Attack's Blue Lines or Dizzee Rascal's Boy In Da Corner - or, indeed, The Streets' Original Pirate Material.
Are you sitting comfortably? Good, then it's time to begin...
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