The new The Streets album ‘Computers and Blues’ hits stores tomorrow folks.

The fifth and final album from Mike Skinner has been doing the rounds on the internet for a good few weeks, but finally it’s time for an official release from the man himself. Skinner is “fucking sick” of the name and the connotations that now go with it which is why this will be his last release under the moniker.

Working closely with Rob Harvey, of The Music, this album is unlike anything he has ever done before and showcases the vocal talents of Harvey and BBC sounds of 2011 nominee Clare Maguire. Computers and Blues is brash and in your face, Skinner has done what he set out to do and created an album you can “dance and drink tea to.”

The first single from the album ‘Going Through Hell’ has a great rock dynamic to it from Harvey and the riff running right down the middle of the track. Skinner is great at adapting his style to suit those he works with and in the process getting the best sound for everyone involved. Lyrics are on biting form “imagine the dilemma for the man and his penance if he could get fucked without hanging his health up would this be illegal would the Daily Mail rail on it?”

It’s a shame Skinner feels he no longer wants to be associated with The Streets, it almost detracts from his creations and he is a modern day poet, don’t let anyone tell you different, “I’m pretty good at puzzles, but puzzled by people.” That lyric gets to the heart of the issue, people associate Skinner with things he’s moved on from; i.e drugs. His most accessible album to date could possibly be his best. Die hard fans might complain about the up-beat pop melodies that are at the forefront of Computers and Blues, but Skinner still retains what made him great, an ear for a brilliant beat and a top-notch rhyme.

Lets hope this is only the end of The Streets and not Mike Skinner.

Check out: Without Thinking

At my school – an all boy type institution – you fell into one of three camps. You might have been an indie-loving sort – rubbish at football and with enormous sideburns to prove you didn’t care about sport. You could’ve been a games-lesson-loving trendy with your facial furniture shaved to the ear so that not a single wisp of sidie adorned your non-hippy head. Or, finally, you may have been a ‘grebo’ – a metaller who broke all the rules and grew hair long, neatly trimming undergrowth with a devastating operation called an undercut – a number one or two all the way around the area below your scalp.

Mr Frank Musik, it seems, is stuck somewhere between these three schoolboy stages.

It’s impossible to comment on this not-entirely-unpleasant single without mentioning it. It’s like a suede toupee, PVA glued to the scalp, catching the eye like a fly floating past the television. It rather overshadows the music, this cut, which isn’t difficult as it sounds like an inoffensive Lloyd-Webber vocal grafted over a directionless Eurodisco loop. The kind of thing you might hear as you wait outside Topshop as the woman in your life spends an eternity deciding nothing in there’s good enough for her.

But then – hark! Is that Holly Vallance?

The appearance of the Aussie beauty, previously thought lost forever, casts a new light on the song, on the video, on Frank, on the WHOLE DAMNED THING! Suddenly I thoroughly approve of Frank and his Musik. And I like watching Holly beating up muggers unconvincingly.

So hats off to Frank Musik. I lift my weird toupee in your direction, for giving some paid work to an antipodean actress who briefly rocked my world. In the 90s.

This new single from the Dolly Rockers is a very confusing thing to watch first thing in the morning. It takes you through the full emotional range. You start off a feeling a bit sick, then become disgusted at how meaningless it all is. You raise an eyebrow, then curl your overhang into a furious frown, mad as hell that this lightweight fluff with it’s weird lyric is being driven into your ears. But then, noticing the insane keyboards (reminiscent of Frank Sidebottom at his best) and the wilful stupidity of the lyric, if you’re as stupid as me, you start not minding it.

You would want to stay away from it for as long as possible and, if you had kids, you’d encourage them to keep a distance, but you realise, ultimately, that it’s actually quite funny.

I’m not saying the creators are comedy geniuses, mind you. Punning ‘eyeful’ as ‘Eiffel’ in a song that seems to be about going out on the pull in an imaginary France doesn’t take the well-oiled skill of a laughter supremo, after all. But it’s funny in the same way that watching a dog fall into a swimming pool would be funny. Funny like a child repeatedly pronouncing the same word incorrectly. Funny like your Nan swearing. Or funny like a man catching a raw egg as it flies through the air, only for it to smash in the palm of his hand as he makes his grab.

It’s You’ve Been Framed funny.

Silly, stupid, novelty funny. And I suppose there’s no harm in that.

We start out with the lead Doll having a soak in a bath, enclosed in a dreary, cold blue room. She is texting someone – presumably Lewis Hamilton – and the tone is sombre. My eyes moisten a little as I realise that she’s probably dumping the racing whizz again. I feel Britain take yet another blow to the goolies at the hands of an American mistress. When she eventually steps out of the bath (sneakily hiding her arse and boobs, the bastard) it’s as if she knows what’s coming…

She is suddenly dressed to the nines and the tempo has instantaneously U turned into a beat I can’t begin to recognise as following any recognised percussive pattern. While I’m still trying to work out what timing we’re in, just so I can get a grip on where this clanging, bashing noise is going, the other Dolls are walking around in a blinding-white Escher installation. You know it’s the other Dolls because they’re the ones you wouldn’t recognise even if you woke up next to them every day until you died. Even if you had their faces tattooed under your eyelids and implanted inside your retina. The generic, two for a pound Dolls who only serve to make their videos seem like there’s a bit more activity in there than their actually is.

Soon they’re in a gay roller disco populated only by generically attractive women and, as if that costume change wasn’t one too many, suddenly Lewis Hamilton’s ex transforms into Gloria Gaynor without the girth and without the incredible singing voice. Surely autotuning a diva with an epic range defeats the point? Surely this can’t be allowed to happen? Surely this song and video is a horrible combination of the garish and the pedestrian?

Like flamboyant drizzle, or an overcast festival?

Thank Christ it lasts less than five minutes. I was ready to call NHS Direct for some beta blockers to try and stave off the arrhythymic palpitations my heart was suffering after listening to what can only be described as a hyper-charged collage of meaningless NOISE.

MY EARS, MY EARS.

JLS are lovely lads, I’m sure, but is this the best their team could come up with after their X Factor semi-success? You’d expect more marketing expertise from such a vigorously relentless machine than the release of one of the least remarkable singles of the year. It sounds so late 90s – a time when boybands were already starting to go out of fashion – that it gives me flashbacks to being 20 years old, drunk, incapable of getting up to turn off Top Of The Pops.

The lyrics are depressingly based around heart-failure. Not broken hearts or heartstrings – actual, fatal heart collapse. And the fact that words about hospitals and CPR are occasionally fed through autotune makes it seem even more like your actually listening to the dying words of a stabbed man as a cat walks across the keys of a Casio organ.

But the music isn’t the worst thing about the video. It’s the dress code that flummoxes me. One of JLS is wearing a bowtie, while the little one – the one with the infant girl’s voice who looks like Howard The Duck – is clearly flouting all the rules. His shirt’s unbuttoned to his navel – and surely that kind of arrogance will rile the rest of the JLS posse?

I predict a shirt-button-code-based split is on the cards.