Solipsism almost destroyed The Streets.

Having debuted with the stunning Original Pirate Material, Mike Skinner suddenly found himself under the full glare of CD:UK when 2004’s A Grand Don’t Come For Free spawned chart topping single Dry Your Eyes. A right little sob story, Skinner was given lexical handjobs from The Sun through to The Guardian – with comparisons to Dostoevsky and Pepys considered wholly acceptable. No wonder it all went to his head.

Whilst nowhere near as bad as many would have you believe, the insular and paranoid follow-up The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living did seem to suggest that Skinner had succumbed to the demons and confused the cushy life of a pop star with something approaching purgatory. When you’re doing nights spraying cars, there’s little joy to be had from a twenty-something bitching about how much cocaine he’s ingested. Accordingly Skinner lost his everyman status and with it his greatest asset; the idea that you could do what he was doing, despite the fact you couldn’t. Or something.

So to album four and a decision. Does Skinner try and reclaim his urban laureate status or should he continue to focus on his own descent into celebrity ennui? The answer is a bit of both, but neither nor. Gone are the chip shoperas and introspective whining, replaced instead by rolling compositions that offer stark juxtaposition to the claustrophobic enclave of his last record. The eponymous opening track of Everything Is Borrowed provides the perfect parenthesis to Skinner’s new found narrative. Where it was once dominated by a 1st person structure that led to an assumption of fact rather than fiction, Skinner now seems happy to let the listener make up their own mind as to whether what they are hearing is tacit reality.

Juddering strings and the plaintive refrain of “I came to this world with nothing and leave with nothing but love” makes Everything Is Borrowed the ideal introduction to The Streets 4.0 – opening the curtains and letting some fresh air blow around the Stella cans and posh. Moving on, Heaven For the Weather is a ruddy great chant-a-long that should satisfy the more splenetic end of his fan base (particularly given its similarity to Getta Bloomin’ Move On…) without alienating those who hated Fit But You Know It, whilst The Sherry End is a brilliant R&B shimmer that can’t help but get you grinning.

Favouring rock to silicon, Everything is Borrowed is musically conservative and does nothing to help the tracts where Skinner gets a whine on – resulting in sags where there should be zips. Alleged Legends is a case in point and would have benefited everyone had it not made it past the studio boundary, whilst the vocally raucous The Dodo would have been a potential classic were it not for the plodding background. Having said that, Everything Is Borrowed represents a much better album than its predecessor and whilst that may be to damn with faint praise, it suggests that Skinner has dispensed with the celebrity lifestyle and found richer subject matter to plunder.

With only one more album left until he retires The Streets for good, Skinner will never surpass the thrilling jolt of his 2001 debut – but Everything Is Borrowed sees him shrugging off the shackles imposed by an over enthusiastic media and discovering a voice that doesn’t rely on Rizzlas or TXT BLLX. Music for an ageing generation.