There seems to be something of a trend in pop music lately towards “quirky” female singer-songwriters. Sarah Blasko, New Buffalo and even Nelly Furtado. Kate Nash (and any similarity to Kate Bush is solely in her name, I assure you), is an artist in the same mould, taking most of her musical cues from Lily Allen and Regina Spektor. While a surefire model for commercial success and indie credibility, Nash can’t manage to overcome the same problems of those two artists, namely, a concentration on style over substance. This makes “Made of Bricks” a frustrating listening experience, at best.

So, what’s wrong with Kate Nash? What is it that inspires such theatrical, melodramatic vitriol? A big part of it is the working-class accent that Nash puts on for a good part of the album. I say, “put on”, because all that one has to do is listen to an interview with Nash to realise that she’s just as privileged and middle-class as I am. So, why the speech patterns that make her sound like she’s a born and bred chav? Possibly it could be some sort of bizarre class guilt or envy, but personally I think that it’s just because she’s been told it will sell. It’s edgy.

Speaking of blatantly transparent attempts to be edgy, lets talk about Nash’s numerous attempts throughout this album to make herself appear in-your-face. Titling a song Dickhead is the most blatant of these. It would perhaps be forgivable if it was a good track, but seeing as it’s at best a throwaway track that largely consists of variants of the lines “What you being a dickhead for?” over a bassline that was probably pinched from “The Idiot’s Guide to playing bass guitar”, then no mercy can realistically be given. Equally “edgy” is Shit Song, which pretty much lives up to its description, consisting this time of a very scruffy sounding drum machine with a simple little piano melody that is later tapped out on what sounds like a cheap Casio. Good musicians record tracks like this and then hide them in vaults to pad out a “B-Sides and Rarities” compilation in a decade’s time, it takes a lousy novelty artist to decide to include a song whose main refrain is “Don’t give me shit/Becase I know that you’re full of it/You’re full of shit/You’re full of shit.”

Nash occasionally gets it right, single Foundations is actually a pretty well composed piece, where Nash’s stream-of-consciousness lyrical style actually suits the song well. It also doesn’t sound like it was recorded in a hurry on cheap synthesisers, which puts it head and shoulders above most of the other songs here. Even here though, Nash has a tendency to indulge in ham-fisted metaphors (You said that I must eat so many lemons/Because I’m so bitter) drags the song down. Similarly, Birds is a gorgeous acoustic piece that perhaps has about the only real emotional resonance on the album, but it’s dragged down by a stupid chorus about birds defecating on your head. Classy.

I’d say that Kate Nash has a lot of potential as an artist and a musician, but everything about this album just screams “fifteen minutes of novelty fame”. It’s very hard to take an artist seriously when she proudly proclaims that “Yer mates aah much fittah” in the middle of a song, and that is why I doubt that many people will still be enthusiastic about this album in six months. Made of bricks this isn’t, it’s more like a house built of the “chavtronica” gimmick, and built upon a foundation of hype.