The Streets

“The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living” (Vice Records)

Sounds like: Snow Patrol meets Vanilla Ice

REVIEW: 3 / 5

In short: Listening to The Streets is a bit like listening to a Guy Ritchie movie on audio tape and cranking up the playback for time-and-a-half fast forward.

Whoever said a street poet has to drive a lowered Impala and wear a backward Lakers cap? With “Easy Living,” The Streets frontman Mike Skinner makes a solid argument that an emcee can drive a Mini Cooper and represent for Manchester United football (that’s soccer).

The Street’s beats are stripped down and don’t offer the frenetic whiz-pop of domestic hip-hop. On the other hand, the Streets actually have something more to say than Skinner’s accumulated amount of promiscuous women and bling. Did I mention he enunciates? Yeah, that’s refreshing.

The lack of excessive electronic buzzing doesn’t mean this album isn’t complex. These tracks invest definite attention in coherent lyricism. Listen closely and you will learn who and how to con, in addition to other useful tidbits about how to make a dishonest quid.

Never mind that all the lyrics are all segmented into a broken cadence that sounds more like iambic pentameter than flowing rhymes. This is hip-hop from the land of the Shakespeare, after all.

For hip-hop lovers interested in a jam with a bit less thug and a bit more “ello guvnor!” keep one eye out for the bobbies and pinch a copy of Easy Living.

– Kevin W. Stillman