Skinner announced himself with Original Pirate Material, a 2002 debut that made him a star in England and a curious interloper to stateside rap fans bewitched by his foreign fancies. His riffs and rhymes scan as hip-hop, but his approach to droll subject matter—cruising for "birds" at the pub, sifting through shake on the couch—reveal him as a homegrown diarist who grew up with beats in the background. Upping his narrative ante, Skinner goes all-in on Grand, a bold follow-up that sounds beguilingly slight and dry until details start sketching its story.
After losing a batch of money in the first track, Skinner wanders through a day in the life of a spurned layabout who's suspicious of his friends, his girlfriend, and himself. In "Could Well Be In," he chats with a girl whose hair-twirling he takes as a sign of keenness. In "Not Addicted," he bets on a soccer game that ends the wrong way. Later that night, he flits about a club in "Blinded By The Lights," a sparse, moody track that gets washed in whoosh as his second dose of ecstasy kicks in. Sounding even more matter-of-fact than he did on Pirate, Skinner displays an eerie sense of economy in lyrics that make much out of minutiae—nervous label-peeling at the bar, text messages gone unreturned, the steely glare of a "friend" up to no good.
Musically, A Grand Don't Come For Free traffics in sparse beats and homespun backgrounds that work like panels in a graphic novel, foregrounding plot points as they frame Skinner's alternately pissed and defeated moods. In "What Is He Thinking," martial noise underlies a tense stare-down, while the acquiescent "Wouldn't Have It Any Other Way" floats alongside an R&B voice crooning about an ashtray in need of emptying. Some of Grand sounds stunted at first blush, but its neat through-line ties everything into place by the conclusion, a devastating pair of tracks in which Skinner surveys empty cans through teary eyes. The resolution works toward a surprising finish, hitting like the last page of a book too spellbinding to leave closed.
