First and foremost: I love concept albums. I believe it makes the artist really think about an overall album and doesn’t allow them to just slop ten songs on a disc and go on their merry way (if you can call those things “songs” Ashlee Simpson). Yet unfortunately sometimes concept albums can overstep their boundaries and be pretentious. (see: prog rock in general).

The Streets’ A Grand Don’t Come for Free is a concept album with a grasp on reality… or it could be the script to a pretty run-of-the-mill Hollywood romantic comedy, I’m not quite sure. The main plot laid out by Mike Skinner is boy loses money, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy loses money forever in a fight (or) boy finds money. That’s right! This album even allows the listener to decide which ending they would like better, but more on that later (that’s your spoiler alert). So take that main plot and add life’s little trinkets such as talking to girls in takeaway restaurants, getting lucky by not placing a bet that would have lost, and getting completely fucked up and you have A Grand Don’t Come for Free.

Mike Skinner really took a chance by following up his debut album with a concept, but he made the right choice by going with what he knows. Each song itself is a story you could picture him telling you in a pub the day after it happened over a pint of Fuller’s. His delivery isn’t what one would call smooth but the offbeat flow draws you in more to that feeling of familiarity since it isn’t so polished. The opener of “It Was Supposed to Be So Easy” isn’t what you would expect to hear as the jump-off track of a hip-hop album with a jerky monotone chorus and a fairly laid-back tone in Skinner’s voice, but it only grows from there.

In relationship-based songs like “Could Well Be In” and “Dry Your Eyes” the more down tempo beats are accompanied by a softer voiced Skinner who shows his feelings for the apple of his eye with honest lyrics and sincerity in his voice that conveys true feelings without the sap. The exact opposite comes out in songs like “Get Out of My House” and “Fit But You Know It” where exasperation is shown with a more jacked up Mike (with the help of some liquid courage) showing that he can run the gamut and is no one trick pony.

So the whole troubled relationship story can get old, but A Grand… offers much more. Another story arc of the disc deals with Mike losing £1000 of his savings and becoming paranoid wondering who could have taken it in “What Is He Thinking?” The production builds up the frantic paranoia that the inner-monologues of the characters in the song are obviously feeling on both sides. “Empty Cans” is the song that takes the choose-your-own-adventure approach to rounding out the album. The first choice has Mike’s broken TV hauled off by a TV repairman who later tells him that he found something in the back of the TV which Mike thinks is a ploy to get more money out of the repair and fisticuffs are thrown. The second choice, signaled by a rewind sound cue and then accompanied by a similar beat to the former option, has Mike’s buddy Scott coming to help fix the TV and then finding that the £1000 had slipped through a crack in the back.

So maybe A Grand… isn’t romantic comedy script as it a multiple storyline TV series where all the characters are intertwined somehow, but either way, all the stories and antics combined on the disc make for one hell of an adventure. If you want a hip-hop disc without the bling and rims and with something more relatable (like stealing a tub of ice cream when you’re drunk) then this one’s for you.

The Streets - A Grand Don’t Come for Free
Vice/Atlantic
8 of 10

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