Remember back at the dawn of punk, when no one really had a “sound” or a “genre” or a banner to stand under, the artists just had something they wanted to say, an urgent desire to get it out of them and a bad attitude? Some readers certainly do remember but, given that Kate Nash was only born in 1987, there is precisely no way she remembers that time period. By the time she was old enough to start caring, punk had already long-since been formalized and some people had already come along to quantify what was and wasn't “punk.” In allowing such a qualification, it didn't take long for punk rock to lose something (a bit of creative freedom) but, every now and a again, an artist comes along and rocks the boat by not bothering to absorb forms, and just makes music the way it sounds right to them. Ironically, those are the artists who come closest to the original spirit of punk – but no one ever calls it that.
And, yes, it has a bit of an attitude problem.
Call it what you like, Kate Nash is the kind of artist who is interested in making music her way and not apologizing for it – the young, upstart punk that she is.
From the moment “Part Heart” hazes in to open the album all slump-shouldered and dripping with Trinity Session-inspired indifference, listeners will immediately start to feel their faces begin to contort into a sympathetic scowl. Here, Nash effortlessly makes hard feelings sound like more fun than they've been in years with lyrics like “part of me's living and part of me's dead/ And the part of my heart we used to lie in you fled/ And it doesn't matter/ I still feel the same,” and those who have been so patiently for a heavy cloud to run across the pop sky will find themselves happily basking in a new shade; this is the kind of perfectly accessible and subversive crabby-pants pop-punk they needed.
Without bothering to wait for applause at her achievement, Nash just keeps going and earnestly re-writes the book of punk as she goes, and the results are fantastic. Utilizing a cliff's notes compendium of ideas from throughout punk's storied history, Nash creates a beautiful and towering monument to defiance as she borrows a bit of surf guitar twang to make “Death Proof” special, runs through “O My God” with a Runaways-esque poppy bent that sounds so sarcastic it hurts, goes back to London circa 1978 to make “Oh” sound like a cover of a Sid Vicious song which never existed and hanging around to ape a caricature of Siouxie Sioux in “All Talk” (complete with the “Words are only in my mouth” line which is just… like, awesome) before returning to the “Phair-grounds” circa Whipsmart for another roll in the fun. At each turn, Nash plays her roll of persona pirate to the hilt and owns each sound she borrows; listeners will floored at how far and completely the singer throws herself into each sound, and amazed at how easily she's able to embody each and then simply discard it and adopt a different one for a different song.
As “You're So Cool, I'm So Freaky” (choice line: “You're so cool, I'm a waste of space”) slows right down with an acoustic guitar to close Girl Talk, listeners will already be searching the back cover of the CD to try and decide where on the album they want to track back to in order to re-enter the fray. Some critics will probably say that Girl Talk is too diverse (hello Pitchfork) and that diversity takes away from the focus of this record, but that's not true; that diversity is the point. All of these songs are punk rock at their core and they interlock but, because because punk has become so exclusionary, Girl Talk can spark a fury in the closed-minded. In that way, Kate Nash successfully proves that not only is breaking the rules still possible, it can sound like a stroke of genius; it certainly does here.
Artist:
www.myignorantyouth.com/
www.myspace.com/katenashmusic
www.facebook.com/katenash
www.twitter.com/katenash
Download:
Kate Nash – Girl Talk – “3AM” – [mp3]
Album:
Girl Talk is out now. Buy it here on Amazon .
