Kate Nash - Made of Bricks
(2008)

Review by Dom Alessio

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Be still my beating heart!

Kate Nash, she of only 20 years of age, wrapped up in pretty op-shop dresses, embellished with gleaming sneakers, Cockney drawl and dirty mouth, is as unlikely a pop starlet as you’ll find.

But damn she looks good on the cover and in the liner notes of "Made Of Bricks", her debut long player.

Her dinosaur detractors will label her success nothing more than a social network flash in the pan. Yes, Nash is of the Panic! At The Disco, Arctic Monkeys and the oft-compared Lily Allen ilk, finding success through MySpace and circumventing the archaic footpath to fame of gigs-fans-record deal-gigs-radio play-superstardom.

But a good song is a good song regardless of where you find it, and Nash has pop goodness oozing out of these 12 tracks.

The comparisons to pop brat Lily Allen aren’t limited to the number of friends on their MySpace profiles. But where Allen digs hip-hop and R&B, Nash sounds more like a lower-class Regina Spektor on a Ben Folds trip. But there’s another element: her background in theatre and exposure to show tunes surfaces in her up-beat, major chord ditties and narrative lyrics.

Ahhh, those lyrics, spat out with rounded vowels, truncated gerunds and the occasional grammatical error (“Why you being a dickhead for?”, “I heard she done some really nasty stuff down in the park with Michael”).

Her playfully naive words, written with a beginner’s hand, are without much lyrical fancy (metaphors and imagery and all those other tricks), and while they’re more style than substance, it suits Nash’s simple, infectious piano melodies.

Songs like We Get On, Mouthwash and Merry Happy put Nash front and centre, where she opts for a simple three-piece band to accompany her music. But rather than confine herself to the cute bubblegum pop star field, Nash stretches her wings.

Dickhead has an R&B undertone with finger snaps holding the beat while inter-sliced strings and damp, staccato jazz guitar puncture through. Pumpkin Soup continues with an R&B backbeat but incorporates a bleating horn section, more musical theatre than Miles Davis. Nicest Thing is a beautiful minor key, violin-laden number that suffers from Nash’s underdeveloped lyrical ability but offers a serene change from the perky piano lines.

"Made Of Bricks" is not without its charms, and alternatively not without its flaws. Nash has fashioned a debut record for kids who love to bop, and unless you have a heart of stone you’ll be hard pressed not to feel something from Nash’s sparkling pop tunes about everyday English life. Her lyrics leave much to be desired, and time will tell whether the sophomore blues crush her enthusiastic spirit.

For now though, we can enjoy her sunny tunes and good looks.

RATING: 3 out of 5

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