(Girl Gang Records)
‘I want a takeaway with you / I don’t care if it’s Chinese food,” sings Kate Nash on her fourth album. It’s a lyric that could easily belong on her first, 2007’s Made of Bricks, a collection of gauche kitchen-sink pop that topped the charts and established Nash as the heir apparent to her early champion Lily Allen. But while the latter has continued to pump out attention-grabbing and occasionally brilliant pop, Nash’s career has floundered. Her new album demonstrates why. Since her zeitgeist-bullseye of a debut, Nash has made it clear she has little interest in remaining sonically relevant – 2013’s Girl Talk, for example, consisted purely of riot grrrl-related reminiscence. She’s retained some of the 90s rock references here, and those conspicuous retro flavours provide the album’s highlights – Life in Pink’s raucous pop-punk bridge; California Poppies’s cheesily industrial chorus – though less charmingly, Nash’s voice routinely descends into a ridiculously abrasive squawk in pursuit of rock vibes, which makes her sound like a duck. It’s a more nebulous strain of nostalgia that means her songs feel slightly stale, with tunes either recalling twee noughties indie or chart pop from half a decade ago. On Made of Bricks, Nash established a naive, deliberately artless lyricism that was ridiculed at the time (most amusingly by Adam & Joe’s Song Wars). But it was also fun and refreshing in its portrayal of modern female adolescence.
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