This album:

KATE NASH
Made of Bricks
(Interscope)

**

Kate Nash is the heir apparent, or the version 2.0, of fleeting British-music-tabloid darling Lily Allen (it depends on whether you liken the British pop-music system more to a royal family or a planned-obsolescence assembly line). Both are young, comfortably posh North London girls who—shock! horror!—aren’t afraid to speak their minds; Allen even effectively anointed her successor to the popular world by placing Nash in the highly visible top eight of her now legendary, apparently career-launching MySpace page.

“Foundations,” the Made of Bricks lead single, has more sparkly momentum than Allen’s relaxed R&B breakout, “Smile”—sometimes that momentum gets the best of Nash; she has a habit of running off rhythm and into spoken word, struggling to cram more syllables than can fit into her lines. “Mouthwash” mixes propulsive instrumentation with superficially introspective lyrics (“this is my face/covered in freckles with the occasional spot”). Old B-side “Birds” is a sweet enough urban bohemian love ballad. The softly rapped verses and gaudy R&B chorus (“I just want your kiss, boy”) of “Pumpkin Soup” are built to chart. The slightly morbid romantic lilt and well-placed violins of “Skeleton Song” suggest a more polished Nick Diamonds. But the distorted drum break and repetitious stutter of the throwaway intro “Play” unfavorably recall both Nash’s red-herring debut single, “Caroline’s a Victim,” and the electro-fop routine of Calvin “I Created Disco” Harris. “Why you being a dickhead for?” even when delivered in a well-practiced, slightly world-weary jazz croon, is not exactly a compelling chorus (“Dickhead”).

Nash possesses a clear, classically trained voice, capable of pulling both jazzy pouts and Björk-lite wails, and she’s surrounded by slickly professional acoustic production—clean guitars, bright pianos, tight but unremarkable rhythm sections, big choruses, occasional blasts of horns or Pro-Tooled synths. And her particular inflections and self-conscious snatches of pub slang (a “fit” here, a “twat” here, a “wot?” there) will appeal to a certain indiscriminating brand of twee Anglophile. Others will be thrown by Made of Bricks’s constant flirting between confessional singer-songwriter and teen-pop modes.

…has grown on me since last deadline. I even taught myself “Foundations” on the piano. That’s all.

(Also, that’s not all: Everett “I Created Grunge” True interviewed the young starlet for the Village Voice; you can read it here.)