Computers and Blues

Around this time last year the Guardian gave their much-coveted (*cough) album of the decade award to The Streets for Original Pirate Material, and I wrote about how I couldn’t help but acknowledge their choice. Now that Mike Skinner is adamantly maintaining that his upcoming release, Computers and Blues will be his last, I took it upon myself to download it and engorge.

While nothing grabs me by the terrestrials in the same way that classic numbers like Blinded by the Lights or Has It Come To This did, it is certainly worth your attention. Skinner’s well-worn and well-versed hands have turned a complete one-eighty in the course of the five albums that complete his output, from the playfulness and aggression of tracks such as Geezers Need Excitement, to the maturity and melancholy of something like Dry Your Eyes, a chart-topper that signaled the new direction of a musical collective on the cusp of international notoriety and acclaim. Meanwhile, he always had a weakness for the juvenile, denoted by the singles of the earlier years, Don’t Mug Yourself and Fit But You Know It (opening lyric: “I think you’re about an eight or a nine, maybe even nine and a half in four beers time”), which marked an otherwise serious attempt to push music forward and create a genre of his own. He does seem to acknowledge, however, that his best loved songs are those in which, in his own words, he “said a bit more than [he] probably felt comfortable with”. Dry Your Eyes, for instance, is steeped in autobiography.

Admittedly, his third and fourth albums, despite my almost fawning admiration for his first two offerings, failed to secure my attention, let alone my affection. Here, on the other hand, with Computers and Blues, Skinner has left us with a record that serves as a more than satisfactory endnote to a successful campaign of artistry. The opening track, I Love My Phone, introduces the vein of technology that runs throughout as a sort of defining trope. As an American reviewer once wrote, with Skinner’s delivery, it seems as though the lyrics are “jammed into measures like an overstuffed couch”, and the chorus in this case is no exception.

How would I survive without my outside
Line to the doubting life
Being in the inside lining
Of my trousers tonight?

The second track, Trust Me, somewhat disconcertingly, reminds me of a Just Jack song. It has, however, already become one of my favorites. During the second verse Skinner has something to say on the small matter of blosting, a foray he has undertaken fairly successfully and uniquely now for a long time.

Now that things are costing nothing
Is any of it good?
Come and love me, read my nothings,
Blogging with the floods.

That’s a rather depressing overview of his online exploits, which, it must be said, extends over yours truly. “Nothings”? Do blosts strive for the “love of others”? My audience may suggest otherwise.

Lastly, A Blip On A Screen is a superb song, and reason enough to buy the album outright when it adorns our shelves on February 7th. It’s a track that combines Skinner’s defining maturity with the earlier threads of melancholy, whilst confronting the terrors of growing up, of familial relationships, but primarily of fatherhood. If you only click through to one of the links here, let it be this one. Listen well.