The Streets - None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive review | Alexis Petridis's album of the week

The Guardian 60

(Island Records)
The musical landscape has shifted from Mike Skinner’s noughties tales of life and laddism, and this mixtape brings in the new guard from Ms Banks to Idles

Cast your mind back to the summer of 2004. Mike Skinner – that then-rarest of things, a British rapper who had found not only a uniquely British voice, but a huge mainstream audience – is virtually inescapable. His second album as the Streets, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, is on its way to going quadruple platinum. Reviews have placed his wry, warm depictions of everyday early twentysomething life – drink, drugs, clubs, kebabs, package holidays – in a grand songwriting lineage that includes the Kinks’ Ray Davies and Ian Dury. The attendant single Dry Your Eyes has become ubiquitous: one rumour claims its omnipresence was aided by Skinner’s record label deliberately delaying its release in order to capture the national mood when England inevitably crashed out of Euro 2004.

It was the commercial zenith of Skinner’s career. Nine years after calling time on the Streets, he finds himself in a markedly different musical world from the one that bore him to fame: a British rapper with both a uniquely British voice and a huge mainstream audience is thankfully no longer a novelty. As with Kano’s cover of Has It Come to This? and laudatory tweets from Skepta, the guest list of None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive is testament to Skinner’s impact: a wide-ranging array of younger rappers – Ms Banks, Jimothy Lacoste, Dapz on the Map – alongside Tame Impala and Idles. Furthermore, while rooted in garage, his production style never linked itself explicitly to one musical trend. The beats on None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive are impressively rough-hewn – there’s no sign of the commercial choruses that powered Dry Your Eyes or Never Went to Church – lurching from abstract hip-hop on the title track to post-dubstep on Eskimo Ice, its title presumably a nod to Wiley, to drum’n’bass on Take Me As I Am to Falling Down, based around a piano part that sounds not unlike Heart and Soul, the Hoagy Carmichael song beloved of kids beginning to learn the instrument.

Related: Mike Skinner: 'It's not cool to be 40 in a nightclub, getting off your face. But it happens'