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All Killer – Original Pirate Material (2002)

February 17th, 2019 · Posted by Skuds in Music · No Comments · Music

Well this is a bit recent for me. When it came out I was nearly 40 and so I should be too old for it, but I picked it up at the market in Lower Marsh one lunchtime and when I put it on the stereo that evening I could not do anything until it finished, at which point I immediately ripped to to the computer and loaded it on my iRiver for the next day’s commute.

One reason why all killer albums are more likely to be older, specifically pre-mid-80’s is because of CDs. An old vinyl album could cram 60 minutes in at the expense of sound quality, but the sensible limit was about 45 minutes and some were not much more than 35 minutes. A CD could hold 80 minutes easily. How many bands had a traditional album of top-flight material, put it on a CD and realised that there was more than half an hour of spare room, so filled it with whatever they had knocking round? A longer running time looks like more value for money, but some of the content is literally filler.

No such trouble with the Streets, Mike Skinner keeps the album to a running time of 47 minutes, all of which deserves to be there. Right from the start it grabs your attention with dramatic strings before the beat kicks in and Skinner’s spoken voice vernacular poetry rounds it off.

Its hard to point at a particular highlight, but I suppose Let’s Push Things Forward was my favourite at the time. The track The Irony of it All is the track that, for me, was most likely to disqualify this album. While it is not filler, it is comes very close to being annoying, and it should be, but Mike Skinner just about gets away with it.

You might expect that if any Streets album should be lauded it would be A Grand Don’t Come For Free. It is a more mature album, actually a proper concept album but tracks like Blinded by the Lights and Get Out of my House let it down so, while the overall album is great and tracks like Fit But You Know It and Dry Your Eyes are stone-cold killers, it doesn’t match the debut album. Remember the theory – dbut albums are much more likely to have more killer and less filler!

Original Pirate Material qualifies because, after all, geezers need excitement.

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