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Mike Skinner raps like Christopher Walken speaks. The 23-year-old everyday British bloke behind the Streets never met a lyric he didn’t transform into his own peculiar riff on Brummie intonation. Skinner squashes consonants, stretches one-syllable words into polyrhythmic banter, applies stresses unconvenTIONally, and has this nigh. Fascinating cadence that. Puts. Pauses in un. Expected places.

Skinner’s vocal charisma is a solid strength, as musically his sophomore joint, A Grand Don’t Come for Free, is all setting, shifting rhythms and moods that stymie categorizing his schizophrenic beat mash of American hip-hop and U.K. garage (or whatever it’s called now). You see, A Grand isn’t merely an album. It’s Skinner’s concept novella told in 11 song chapters.

It’s an utterly uninteresting story—bloke loses 1,000 quid, has girl, loses shit on E, lusts after a different girl, finds out girl shagged his mate, feels like hell—which is why Skinner’s storytelling panache is so crucial. His slangy stream-of-consciousness rhymes carry A Grand from its going-nowhere beginning (“Today I’ve achieved absolutely naught/ In just being out of the house I’ve lost out,” he quips on “It Was Supposed to Be so Easy”) through its drug-fueled paranoia (“Blinded by the Light”) and climactic scene where a peacoat betrays infidelity (“What Is He Thinking?”). Quotidian and droll, yes, but Skinner colors every corner with a ribald, manic precocity that animates his characters’ inner lives, making A Grand so engrossing to follow, and so difficult to ignore.

E-mail Bret McCabe