Kate Nash
My Best Friend Is You

THE REVIEW

"Made Of Bricks", the 2007 debut album by Kate Nash, seemed like the secret diary of a good London girl. A place to vent anger, whims, heartaches, and more.

It had everything inside: swear words, love, adventures, and so much more, yet always accompanied by a unique freshness, a very rare genuineness in the contemporary music industry, which made Nash, in the eyes of critics and the public, an extremely rare pearl, a true revelation. And the album was a real diamond.

Yet the Caparezzian law that states "the second album is always the hardest in an artist's career" made no exception for the new indie-pop starlet, and two whole years of working on the album weren't enough to give us an equally memorable chapter.

The album is a melting pot, where, in a sort of schizophrenic outburst, the twenty-three-year-old throws in everything she likes and feels, attempting, not always successfully, to reinterpret it all in her personal style.

If in "I Just Love You More" it sounds like listening to a cover of Courtney Love, and "Take Me To A Higher Plane" could be the result if we combined Gogol Bordello and Vampire Weekend in one song, "Mansion Song" seems like a recording of thoughts and chants at a 21st-century feminist rally, "Do-Wha-Doo" (memorable first single) sounds like it's off a Pipettes album, and "Pickpocket" is pure 'ReginaSpektorian' citation.

Unfortunately, much of the album seems like songs taken out of the freezer and warmed up in the microwave, it loses the originality of the previous album, there's no track that could reach the peaks of brit-pop masterpieces like "Foundations" and "Skeleton Song"; on the contrary, songs like "Kiss That Grrrl", "Early Christmas Present", and "Later On" guiltily sound like offcuts from "Made Of Bricks".

Fortunately, "Don't You Want To Share The Guilt" with its charming ukulele strumming at the start, the aforementioned "Do-Wha-Doo", a formidable rockabilly take on jealousy, and the three acoustic closing tracks, where Kate Nash shows her calmer and more moderate side, whether at the piano, "Pickpocket", or with a guitar in hand, "You Were So Far Away", very close to "Anyone Else But You" from the film "Juno", and a new studio version of "I Hate Seagulls", undoubtedly the best track of the entire album, whose demo had already appeared on YouTube about a year before the album's release raising a chorus of approval from fans, lift the situation.

An album, therefore, disappointing compared to the debut, but good in its own small way.