squidpants

so the new Streets album, Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living, is on Myspace, and I am not impressed. It seems like his albums are getting worse and worse - I thought Original Pirate Material was fantastic, A Grand Don't Come for Free was ok, and this one is less than ok. It seems very tossed off (either the American or British translation of that phrase).

At least A Grand Don't Come for Free had "Fit But You Know It," which was a fantastic song that always causes me to dance uncontrollably, which is pretty rare. This album, however, doesn't have any really great songs, or even songs I'd like to listen to again. "Pranging Out," which I think is supposed to be the single, is pretty annoying.

I always thought his beats were the strong point of the first album, as they were really catchy and different, but on A Grand and this one, they're just getting choppier and uninteresting. He seems to be focusing on making his songs funny (and they're not that funny) rather than spending time to make good beats. You can't skip songs on Myspace, which sucks, but most of my notes on the songs are either "annyoing," "blah," "choppy," or "sort of funny, but blah" so you aren't missing much if you don't want to listen all the way through. "When You Wasn't Famous" is amusing and has the best beat, but that's not saying too much. "Never Went" and "Two Nations" got decent notes - "not bad, slow" and "kind of dumb US vs UK song" respectively. "Two Nations" does have a funny line though, "we were the ones who invented the language!" And "War of the Sexes" is alright, I wouldn't be shocked to hear it at some hipster dance night, and I might enjoy it if I had had a few.

I wish Mr. Skinner would have waited a bit, held onto the decent songs, and recorded some other stuff rather than the rest of the album, which is basically filler. He does have a cool website however, and you can hear part of "When You Wasn't Famous" in "the shed".