Don’t You Want To Share The Guilt – Kate Nash
Early Christmas Present – Kate Nash
I complained yesterday about some records that I was really looking forward to which left me feeling a bit disappointed. In an effort to change the tone, I’ll try and talk for the next few posts about records that absolutely lived up to my hopes.
First on the list is the new record from Kate Nash, which is everything that you’d expect from her, and more. All over the place, full of big pop hooks, a confessional style that is both awkward and endearing, poignant, occasionally over-indulgent, but often charmingly brilliant. In short, it’s a wonderful follow-up to 2007’s Made of Bricks, which featured four or five brilliant songs as well as a couple head-scratchers. My Best Friend Is You is similarly varied, with some wonderfully high moments and more than a few places that pull you up short. Which is part of the magic.
Things start out normally enough, with both “Paris” and “Kiss That Grrrl” offering fairly mainstream, slightly doo-wop inflected, pop–with just enough attitude to make it clear that this is Kate Nash and not some interchangeable starlet.
The first big twist comes with “Don’t You Want To Share The Guilt,” which maybe be her most interesting song yet. It begins quietly, introspectively, and with a bit of distant pain in her voice. After about a minute and a half the drums join in, and add a sense of disquiet. The general tone is still quiet beauty but you start to feel an element of urgency. This is captured perfectly at 2:47 when she whispers “listen…” and the notes are piercingly clear. But things are just about ready to run off the rails, as the deep sadness, pain, loss, and general sense of breakdown gets splayed out before you in a wonderfully mad stream-of-consciousness rant. As it goes on and gets more and more frantic you feel just how claustrophobic it can get inside the head of someone who has no outlet. It’s brilliant and absolutely crammed with pathos.
The next two songs provide as clear a contrast as you’ll get about the multitudes contained on this record. “I Just Love You More” is a grungy bit of riot-girl sludge. It’s terrible and fascinating at the same time — and is set off perfectly by the fact that the next song “Do-Wah-Doo” is about as pure a piece of straightforward Phil-Spectored-girl-pop as you could want. This is followed by “Take Me To A Higher Plane” which splits the difference. It holds onto the pop sensibility but sets her free to flail about.
That’s a theme repeated a number of times on this record. There are a number of songs that aren’t strictly ‘good’ by any reasonable definition. But the atonal grinding of “I’ve Got a Secret” builds up the reverb in order to provide stark relief to the bubblegum that resides elsewhere. Meanwhile, if the semi-rant to close out “Don’t You Want To Share The Guilt” is a pitch-perfect characterization of a personality under great strain, then the one to open “Mansion Song” is the flip-side. Where the former exposes the earnestness and simple humanity, the latter is the aggressive and mad and so over-the-top in its littering of bad words and sexual imagery that it’s impossible to take it seriously. The resulting track is almost impossible to listen to, but perversely (and I use that word advisedly) appealing.
Lest things get too far off the rails, she brings things back to earth with a couple songs that are almost trademark Kate Nash. “Early Christmas Present” is the logical heir to “Foundations” or Mouthwash” – with the same simple major chord progressions and snarky lyrics (the present is an STI) that made us all fall in love with her in the first place.
Elsewhere, “I Hate Seagulls” is the heir to “Birds” – the deceptively simple acoustic track designed to reveal the significant truths that often lie hidden in plain sight. It’s not as well done as “Birds” but still packs a punch. After listing off a litany of her other minor dislikes (“I hate burning my finger on the toaster, And I hate knits, I hate falling over, I hate grazing my knee”) she declares out of nowhere: “I hate all the mistakes I make.” It’s very affecting.
In the end, this is a record with many flaws. But that’s part of what makes it so great. It’s a bit messy and incoherent, but in the end so is life. And that’s not a bad point to make. Without the couple standout pop songs to keep things lively, this would be just a mess. But because she gives us the candy, it gives all the rest a bit more stability as well.