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It feels like a definite upgrade for her, Kate Nash deluxe, courtesy of producer Bernard Butler's expectedly lavish touches. But her standard style of outloud diary readings are not privy to the same overhaul. They prevent it from feeling like much of a progression.
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My Best Friend Is You is, indubitably, rather daring for a mainstream pop album. Yet for all the Butler-begat polish, it's hard to work out whether it really is a mainstream pop album.
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My Best Friend Is You builds on her more conventional 2008 debut, Made of Bricks, with a punchy, almost dizzying mix of garage-rock bedlam, scene-skewering snap, and sweet girl-group melodies.
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My Best Friend Is You hasn't got the immediate freshness of Made Of Bricks, and it can make for a disorientating, uneven listen at times. Yet it's never anything other than compelling and demonstrates that, despite what a lot of people thought when she first appeared, that Kate Nash could well be around for a good few years yet.
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Largely, though, Nash sounds just like herself, and that's exactly when she shines most brightly.
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My Best Friend is You is peppered with pettiness, too, but it's a little more grown-up-and way more amped-up.
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The album moves from infatuation and jealousy to lust and betrayal to real, young love. And it does so with not just the best of intentions-- feminism, anti-homophobia, artistic experimentation-- but also, in the storytelling style of the Streets or Sweden's Hello Saferide, a set of distinctive, well-crafted songs that should strike a chord with self-deprecating teens and twentysomethings.
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Longing for a woman's kiss, f-bombing a girl for selling herself short, and tasting the barrel of a gun, Nash is an oversharing spitfire who won't be ignored--not to mention a huge talent.
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Now 22, she's full-on pissy and proud, pulling from some reliable forebears on this fascinating follow-up.
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Nash is at her best here when she's following The Pipettes back to girl groups' heyday, and while it doesn't end with the bang that it starts with, My Best Friend Is You will make most people wish that their post-teen angst sounded this good.
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Not only has the sound been plumped up with girl-group strings--for which thank producer Bernard Butler--she's been listening to Bikini Kill and Sonic Youth and is consequently far more daring a writer and singer.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 20 out of 29
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Mixed: 2 out of 29
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Negative: 7 out of 29
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May 27, 2011Quite possibly the worst album I've ever bought. What Happened Kate? One trick pony?
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Dec 1, 2011
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Sep 7, 2011