One of the stars of last years ‘Are You Listening?’ Festival in Reading drops a full album.

Where this album lands with you is likely to come down to where you stand on ‘The Streets.’ If you find them witty, clever and musically interesting you are going to have a great time here. If you don’t get along with Mike Skinner’s brand of dance backed spoken word rap, then this is going to wind you up big time.

Overall, I enjoyed it, though it comes with a few caveats. Musically there are some nice backing tracks for several of the tunes. ‘Service Station at the End of The Universe’ is almost like an offcut from Moby’s infamous ‘Play’ album with a side order of psychedelic Mancunian Indie. ‘Rafters,’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Fallacy’ and ‘The Great Pyramid of Stockport’ up the dance vibes with the latter being my favourite track on the whole album. I also enjoyed the obvious allusions to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as no one who appreciates Douglas Adams can truly ever be that bad.

One of Szmierek’s earlier EPs was entitled ‘Poems to Dance To’ which really sums up his modus operandi. This is both a strength and weakness of this album. There are many astute observations in here and fine lyrical twists, but if you separate it out there are points where the quality of it as just poetry would be questionable as gets a little one note in style. On the flip side the monotony of the delivery can start to make you zone out so you can’t really fully appreciate it as singing/rapping. Whilst rare, it is possible to do poetry set to music well. Saul William’s ‘Amethyst Rockstar’ album from 2001 would be an excellent example of this.

Overall, if you like chilled dance music or The Streets there is going to be enough here for your enjoyment. Otherwise, you might want to stick to the high-quality singles. I found this enjoyable, but Smierek may need to change things up on the next album to stay relevant.