I’m going to start “Move to Trash” as a recur­ring fea­ture for new albums that are big let­downs. First up? The Streets’ lat­est album, Every­thing Is Bor­rowed.

As I com­ment­ed on Stere­ogum’s Pre­ma­ture Eval­u­a­tion post, fame has not been kind to Mike Skin­ner. Like his last album, The Hard­est Way to Make an Easy Liv­ing, Skin­ner has a hard time recap­tur­ing the glo­ry of his mad­cap ram­blings on Orig­i­nal Pirate Mate­r­i­al and the bril­liant A Grand Don’t Come for Free. Instead of bizarre rhymes about every­day dra­ma, Skin­ner resorts to pre­scrip­tions for right liv­ing and hor­ri­ble self-help advice.

Where are the fun songs? Lul­la­by beats make me very sleepy. Can some­one remind Mike Skin­ner that he made “Fit But You Know It?” Every­thing Is Bor­rowed, like its pre­de­ces­sor, is the sound of a 12-step pro­gram put to music. It’s depress­ing to see such a promis­ing artist com­plete­ly lose track of what made him so inter­est­ing in the first place.

I take back every­thing I ever said about Mike Skin­ner being the new incar­na­tion of Mark E. Smith.