Kate Nash
Made of Bricks (Fiction)
By Erin Wolf
Published: January 7th, 2008 | 6:51am
“Right birds can fly so high/ and they can shit on your head/ and they can almost fly into your eye/ and make you feel well scared/ but when you look at them / and you see that they’re beautiful/ that’s how I feel about you/ yeah that’s how I feel about you…”
Charming, Kate.
Kate Nash, in her own way, sums up how awkward it is to tell someone you really like them. You know, like, like like. Nash, the little miss with a cocky cockney accent (which hulks over the music like fellow banter-er, The Streets’ Mike Skinner), makes an appeal with her Freaky Friday formula going from confident young woman to shy girl to bratty tot with a mere shift in song. Her full-length release, produced by Paul Epworth (Bloc Party, Futureheads), is a study in these opposites, but the rough, home-hewn spots of her first popular releases are now glazed, thanks to Epworth, and have created a more mature tone than the queen of GarageBand has previously held.
On Made of Bricks Nash takes her simplistic, piano-driven tunes straight out of her bedroom at her parents’ house and airs them out for the public to either: hate, fawn over, or dissect into comparisons to Lilly Allen and Regina Spektor. Lyrics about cheese on toast, Goth teenagers, ‘dickhead’ boyfriends, flossing and the fun of ‘winding someone up’ is all fair play to Nash, and creates a captivating/horrifying listening experience. Should we be impressed that the girl has the pluck to pen a song about her usage of mouthwash? Or should we sincerely roll our eyes and wonder just, what the ‘ell’?
Soul-baring is a hallmark of singer-songwriters everywhere, but should there be a limit when it comes to singing about dental hygiene? Pluck is an admirable quality, and accents are charming, but it only makes for an interesting trifle made of marshmallows. No bricks, here.
Issue #35
Comments
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BrittanyJulious (5 months)
I'm definitely bummed that you didn't like the album. I personally love it. I wish you written more about the actual songs themselves. You don't even indicate what song the lyrics from the beginning of the review are from.
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