Month: February 2011

Mike Skinner is back with his fifth and final hurrah under his moniker The Streets, with Computers And Blues, and the premise of being a more ”˜Ravey”™ reflective and evaluation of life at “Street Level”.

From the offset, Skinner positively demonstrates his intent to stretch the boundaries of musicality with the strangely syncopated and electrified introduction to opening number Outside Inside, combined with the ever-familiar, casually poetic style flowing tamely alongside the sporadic melody. Going Through Hell features a catchy ear-worm chorus and an almost obnoxious and leary driven thumping backing track.

Sadly though, the better tunes look to have already passed and the rest of the album seems to lose its way, with the next tracks failing to deliver or cover any significant new ground in its material content, sometimes seeming to have to resort to repetition to get the across the themes in the subject matter. Skinner has opted to stretch his poetic abilities with the use of more abstract metaphors which, often overused, actually hinder empathy with the lyrical content.

A ghostwriter is someone who writes for and gives credit of authorship to another. A ghostpoet, we can infer, is that specific kind of ghostwriter whose work takes on a more creative, flowing, literative interpretation of events. Calling yourself Ghostpoet is actually pretty clever. It draws the focus on the music and not the musician, on the art and not the artist. It tells us to view the artist only as the pen, putting things together for the sake of the content, not the sake of the writer. It draws on the numinous of creativity, rather than the identity of it.

Also, it’s a pretty cool name.

It’s this juxtaposition between heady artistry and down-to-earth easiness that Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam presents us with. If he’s the ghostwriter, you’re the fence.