(Atlantic)
By Sean Moeller

Some people you can just listen to talk without giving two cares or three cheers for what they’re saying. The words and the message are inconsequential. Paul McCartney, for instance, probably makes an insignificant waste of a story – maybe something about his tire pressure being low on the rear driver’s side wheel of his car or a vignette about the way the family cat yawned in the late afternoon that was positively adorable – turns into a dumpling, something worthy of a half-hour program on NPR. Sir Paul could read the Weather Channel’s 10-day planner aloud and enthrall me, or do the closest thing to it. He could make me listen and make me an interested party. At the same time, Eva Mendes holds me the same way. I couldn’t tear myself from “Hitch” for the life of me. Now that’s a lie. But I was torn. Must…hate…everything…Will…Smith…is…involved…with. Except Eva Mendes.

Anyway, Mike Skinner is another Sire Paul/Eva Mendes kind of guy, mostly because he jabbers all of what seem to be words made up by third-graders and rationalizes them. I think prangin’ (from the first track off his new album) can mean freaking and so, so many other things. I can’t really get my brackets on it, but its universality is frightening and pure goodness. It’s akin to saying I smurfed my toe on the armoire the other day and it smurfed like smurf for two smurfs before the smurfing finally went smurf. That’s Mike Skinner some of the time and the other times he’s the most intriguing bouncer of linguistics and holy roller of barbs and Braille working today. He’s the way John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats would be were we to slap on him the rotten English accent of some bloke with an unstable take on his own life (not one of a fictitious alpha male and female couple, though he’s getting into more of Skinner’s autobiographical turf with every passing album) and take away most of the melody in his voice.

He makes his life story – tall tale or accurate down to the finest details – imperative. With “Original Pirate Material” and especially “A Grand Don’t Come For Free,” Skinner has been one of those artists who makes it easy to care about what he’s going to say next. I mean, that goes for The Shins and Pearl Jam and U2 and so many others, but those anticipations are systematically different in a trillion ways. When Skinner writes a record, it’s the same thing as finding that long-lost page four of a five-page letter. It’s a new chapter that goes beyond any “new chapter” that Eddie Vedder may have in mind. His are just songs – in the newest case, very charged songs that hate a certain negligent Texan – that follow a style, but not a discontinued voice. “The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living” is another 11 songs of the “to be continued” part of Skinner’s life that we were left cliffhangered and waiting for since “A Grand” was released and devoured two years ago. Though not as cohesive or reaching as the sophomore record, “The Hardest Way” achieves by going in those different directions. Skinner stamps some new tricks into the tracks that weren’t previously there. He tries singing a little more and gets sentimental even more often than he tried to on the last album. All improvements and reasons for a pat on the back.

“War of the Sexes” is a dissertation on the differences between men and women on the prowl and ends with the bar logic, “People who get hammered don’t get to nail.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. The title track, “Never Went To Church” and “When You Wasn’t Famous” get right into the pits of Skinner’s psyche, and probably cut more true to life than anything else on this record, offering a glaring window into his new troubles. He’s not looking for lost money or trying to get videotapes back to Blockbuster, he’s trying to itemize his album budget, get with famous birds without camera phones stalking his every move and wondering out-loud whether his father’s proud of him. “Never Went To Church” is gut-wrenching at times in its brutal nakedness and it’s a play at sentimentality that works, unlike that on “All Goes Out The Window,” the only waste of a song on the record. He’s having trouble coping with his famousness, but damn it if I don’t want some flies in the soup. It seems to make him a better writer, a more compassionate writer (in the long run I’m betting) and a more interesting person. We don’t need him writing about cars he’s purchased with his riches, but it’s twistedly fascinating to hear him contemplating suicide at a time when his career is on its upswing. This is probably more normal than we’d think, but it’s not very often that it’s heard. We knew to expect it out of this chap.

It’s not as prangin’ great as “A Grand Don’t Come For Free,” but “The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living” is all heart and swinging, hypnotizing watch.

www.the-streets.co.uk
www.vice-recordings.com