Back in the early 00s, Mike Skinner and James Murphy both seemed like transformative figures: two charismatic producer/talkers with rhythm, intelligence, senses of humor, and senses of gravitas. Both were innovators who existed at once inside and outside a pair of emerging genres (grime and dance-punk, respectively), and both focused so fully on their own tiny corners of existence that they made those experiences tangible to people who only had the slightest idea what they were talking about. Now, a decade later, both are preparing to say goodbye to their signature projects.
Skinner's landmark debut, Original Pirate Material, hit just months before LCD Soundsystem's "Losing My Edge" single, but the follow-up, A Grand Don't Come for Free, arguably holds up better today. A staggering conceptual LP, the record was a grounded and powerful piece of linear storytelling that found Skinner in a more challenging and ambitious mode. But in that album's wake, Skinner adapated a much less relatable and charismatic persona, releasing a pair of disappointing LPs that squashed his accumulated goodwill. The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living was a near-fatal cocaine-and-tabloids tantrum, an attempt to shed light on celeb-culture shallowness that simply wound up indulging in it. And Everything Is Borrowed was even stranger, an amber-hued pastorale that made no sense at all. Now, convinced he's got nothing left to say, Skinner gives us Computers and Blues.
A collection of lesser beats and hooks that somewhat returns to Original Pirate Material's sonics, Computers and Blues sadly trades that record's wonderful sense of place for a foggy vagueness that leaves Skinner's insights mostly impenetrable. And yet, after the last two albums, it feels something like a return to form, actually coming closer to the particular weird spark of Skinner's debut than anything he's released since. Even the image of the apartment building on the cover echoes the lonely tenement on his first album. And as a series of disconnected sketches with cheap bedroom beats, Computers and Blues is not without its charm.
But where Original Pirate Material empathetically chronicled the lives of its scabby potheads, Computers and Blues mostly concerns their weed-hazed days-- including, on "Outside Inside", the frustrating inability to get off the couch. Even as Skinner toys with some truly dumb lyrical conceits, it's a joy to hear him push language around: "The fossiled remains of lots of ancient ways are buried or lost in every one of my mates' brains." And there's also the genuinely moving "A Blip on a Screen", a vulnerable and wonderstruck song about seeing your kid on an ultrasound screen for the first time.
Musically, too, this is still recognizably the work of the kid who once mined rap and garage for everything he could use and threw the rest away. The beats are all endearingly awkward and homemade-- drums and horns and Bollywood samples tripping all over each other rather than combining into any sort of steamroller. A few tracks bring a nice garge-disco glide, an encouraging sign that Skinner could go on to be quite good at actual dance music. The hooks may be uniformly awful, but at least he's trying.
Still, nothing on Computers and Blues rivals even the weakest moments of Skinner's first two albums, and it comes out at the same time of something much more encouraging: a mixtape called Cyberspace and Reds, which Skinner claims is all music he's made since he finished this album. Cyberspace and Reds dips deeper into British rap than Skinner has ever allowed himself to go, with old grime comrades like Wiley and Kano and Jammer stopping by to talk shit. It's fun, for a change of pace, and it offers no indication that Skinner's trying to make an important piece of work. If he can lighten up enough to make something like that, there could be hope for him yet.
