Few things are more exciting than hearing the debut album of a complete unknown and realising that a major new talent has arrived on the scene. So let's not mince words here: Original Private Material is an unadulterated triumph that marks out Mike Skinner, a 22-year-old former fast food salesman from Birmingham, as the most vibrant new voice on the British rap scene. It's got little to do with the music, mind you, which was mostly recorded on a tinny bedroom keyboard and is often so rudimentary that this feels like a spoken word album - but that's no problem when the lyrics are as compelling as they are here. Skinner's freewheeling narratives are essentially despatches from the frontline of British youth streetlife, a melange of male violence, drugs and the perpetual fight against boredom in a cultural wasteland (you can tell it's British rather than American because the characters use fists, not guns, to settle their disputes). It's all been done before, of course, but Skinner has a sharp, quickfire wit of his own that makes most of his rivals seem like dullards. The final word on The Streets? Simple: One of the albums of this, or any other year.

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