"Can everyone please stop calling Kate Nash the new Lily Allen? Kate is a very talented songwriter, and her music sounds nothing like mine, she exists in her own right and it must be really annoying for her to be compared to me the whole time!". When even Lily Allen herself blogs about Kate Nash's right to be seen as a musical individual, you know that things are serious. Allen may chide the media for correlating the two young Londoners, but there's no getting away from the fact that they are similar, both in sound and style. If Nash has an edge on her counterpart, however, it's her ability to weave her ivory-tickling melodies into pop songs that are as hip and as fresh as anything you'll hear in the charts these days. Of course, you'll no doubt be already familiar with the song that powered Nash into mainstream consciousness, Foundations, and although not every song on Made of Bricks is as slickly luscious or as instantly likeable, a good deal of the hour-long album is encouragingly satisfying. There are a swarm of uptempo, tentatively-experimental pop songs that shift and slide with dinky piano riffs and off-centre beats (the gorgeously-sunny and swinging We Get On and the manic Mariella), a brace of tracks that are distinctly r'n'b-tinged (the hip-as-hell Sh*t Song and the Ms. Dynamite-esque Pumpkin Song), as well as several hard-hitting ballads (the beautifully bittersweet Birds and sombre, enchanting standout Nicest Thing) that are wonderfully-written and surprisingly mature for Nash's tender (twenty) years. Though she does veer off course several times with songs that are a bit too saccharine or drawn-out (Skeleton Song, Mouthwash), Nash's jazzily-textured voice and talent for an amusing lyrical couplet ("You said I must eat so many lemons 'cos I am so bitter / I said 'I'd rather be with your friends mate, 'cos they are much fitter") hold fort throughout. Made of Bricks is far from a perfect album, and if you're not a fan of the 'chavtronica' genre, you won't like it. Those with a soft spot for disarming pop songs, however, will be excited about Nash's potential as a songwriter.
