September 15, 2006

The Streets (Feat Pete Doherty): Prangin’ Out

Great, but was it worth all them brain cells

Photo Gallery: The Streets

Who’d have thought flooding your frontal lobe with a smorgasbord of chemicals developed by blind farmers in Bolivian death camps could do you any damage? Who’d have thought that staying up every single night would encourage a hallucinogenic paranoia bordering on irreversible psychosis? Who’d have thought Pete Doherty could rap (kinda)? Mike Skinner, that’s who.

The last Streets single made us cringe by sounding a bit like it sampled ‘Let It Be’; but brother Mike has returned triumphantly with more edge than a Rubik’s cube. Well, we say triumphantly, but from the sounds of ‘Prangin’ Out’ he spends his time crying for lost sanity in hotel rooms, so maybe rigorous therapy is more useful to him than TOTW.

Asking potty Pete to guest as an MC on your latest single may seem like the terrible judgement of an addled mind, but in fact it’s an inspired move, as this is a zillion times better than anything either of these guys have coughed up recently. PD’s appearance adds a spoonful of bubbling brilliance to Skinner’s narco-nous. His slightly nonsensical, melancholic stuttering brings a tear to the eye without ever resorting to saccharin ‘Dry Your Eyes’-style melodrama. Skinner serves up a feast of straight-talking self-loathing and anxiety, which centres around a hook of such druggy intensity that it’d cast a Mormon Alan Shearer into a sea of wrist-slicing, incontinent cold-turkey terror. Got problems with drugs? Screw Frank, talk to Pete and Mike.

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