Records are rated on a scale of one (awful) to four (classic) stars:
KATE NASH 'Made of Bricks' (Geffen)
The newest MySpace phenom has been playing down comparisons to Lily Allen, but there's no getting around the resemblance to the British star that broke just before her.
With her major-label debut, "Made of Bricks," we get the same brash attitude, pretty voice, perky mashup of styles and confessional lyrics about the push-and-pull between girls and boys.
The back story on Nash is that she's a 20-year-old Dublin native raised in South London, where she was studying theater. After taking a fall that broke her foot, she started composing songs on a laptop and posting them on MySpace. There, she ended up in Allen's top eight, and last summer her single, "Foundations," hit No. 2 on the British charts.
"Foundations" jumps out of the speakers with bubbly and infectious pop driven by a wondrous layering of keyboards, handclaps and drum machines, while Nash, with Cockney accent, laments a brush-up. The more rocking "Mouthwash," with its chorus of "And I'm singing uh-oh on a Friday night," is just as adorable, sounding like Bjork's little sister.
There's a sweet vulnerability to "We Get On," a song in which Nash crushes hard for a guy but is too shy to act. When she tracks him down at a party, it doesn't go as hoped. "When I saw you kissing that girl/my heart it shattered/and my eyes, they watered, and when I tried to speak, I stuttered." Her friends console her with "his eyes are way too close together and we never liked him from the start," but she "locks herself in the toilets the entire night."
On the darker side is "Nicest Things," a tense, brooding emo-ish ballad delivered with guitar and violin that has her singing sadly, "I wish I was the last thing on your mind before you went to sleep."
"Birds" is more of a folk song with a Mazzy Star-like steel guitar in the background, but Nash's offbeat lyrics and elastic phrasing make it all her own.
"Made of Bricks" has a few clunkers, like "Skeleton," a joke that runs on too long, and a pair of songs that lean too hard on the thrill of profanity. Of course, this is the kind of record where people jump around or pluck songs for playlists anyway.
Even if Allen got there first, Nash has still delivered a fresh-sounding record that gets 2008 off to a fun and quirky start.
First Published: January 10, 2008, 5:00 a.m.
