Kate Nash's playfulness on her debut album, Made of Bricks, won her a BRIT award in 2008. Her lighthearted malice and overall quirkiness—not quite Lily Allen's smug vindictiveness, not quite the innocently traumatized personas of Regina Spektor—can be captivating. This coyness, matched with a drastically dynamic array of songs, is what makes My Best Friend is You memorable.
Nash's voice constantly presents emotional complexity. Random vocalizations, repeated one-sentence choruses and flirtations with babbling recitative radiate a certain naïveté in tracks like ""Paris"" and ""Do-Wah-Doo,"" while she also sings with a veil of cool spite in tracks like ""Kiss That Grrrl"" with the chorus, ""Kiss that girl, and I will shrink up / And I will die, and I will think up / A thousand ways that I can hurt you, / and you will never touch my hand.""
The album is also filled with both powerful assertions and strength in chaotic spoken-word rants in ""Don't You Want To Share the Guilt"" (""I don't know how more people haven't got mental health issues / Thinking is one of the most stressful things I've ever come across"") and ""Mansion Song"" (""Another undignified product of society / That girl should have been a mansion"").
Fans of her original MySpace hits before 2007's Made of Bricks may become increasingly disenchanted with the comparative overproduction of My Best Friend is You—Nash used to make do acoustically, whereas multiple voice tracking, ornate instrumentation and heavy percussion dominate her new release.
But more often than not, Nash and her producers use certain devices to convey a deeper meaning behind the lyrics that show the development of a musical maturity. The tempo in ""Pickpocket"" briefly slows down at the end of every four measures, representing the hesitation of reminiscing the beginning and predestined end of an ill-fated relationship; the double-time feel by the drums in ""Later On"" is the anguish of a girlfriend who apologizes for who she is. There's also a near-return to beautiful simplicity in ""I Hate Seagulls,"" in which there's a subtle build of acoustic guitar, piano, strings and French horn.
The album features a diverse range of styles, including Motown, pseudo-punk and Irish folk. This eclecticism, which tends to take the listener by surprise from track to track with drastic genre leaps, often forces a lack of cohesiveness for the album as a whole. But this disjointedness isn't a capital crime; in fact, it embodies many of the frenzied, schizophrenic emotions Nash creates in her characters.
While this kind of musical disorder isn't always an attractive quality—especially when expectations for a certain extent of flow and genre consistency are created early on in an artist's career—My Best Friend is You shows Nash's versatility in grasping radically different feels and ideas to express an extensive spectrum of emotion.
