‘I want a takeaway with you / I don’t care if it’s Chinese food,” sings Kate Nash on her fourth album. It’s a lyric that could easily belong on her first, 2007’s Made of Bricks, a collection of gauche kitchen-sink pop that topped the charts and established Nash as the heir apparent to her early champion Lily Allen. But while the latter has continued to pump out attention-grabbing and occasionally brilliant pop, Nash’s career has floundered. Her new album demonstrates why. Since her zeitgeist-bullseye of a debut, Nash has made it clear she has little interest in remaining sonically relevant – 2013’s Girl Talk, for example, consisted purely of riot grrrl-related reminiscence. She’s retained some of the 90s rock references here, and those conspicuous retro flavours provide the album’s highlights – Life in Pink’s raucous pop-punk bridge; California Poppies’s cheesily industrial chorus – though less charmingly, Nash’s voice routinely descends into a ridiculously abrasive squawk in pursuit of rock vibes, which makes her sound like a duck. It’s a more nebulous strain of nostalgia that means her songs feel slightly stale, with tunes either recalling twee noughties indie or chart pop from half a decade ago. On Made of Bricks, Nash established a naive, deliberately artless lyricism that was ridiculed at the time (most amusingly by Adam & Joe’s Song Wars). But it was also fun and refreshing in its portrayal of modern female adolescence.
On Yesterday Was Forever, Nash time travels back to those years (she’s described the record as “an excerpt from a teenage diary” and it’s full of references to hating people and feeling “so dark”), yet appears to have misplaced her talent for writing distinctive – never mind intelligible – songs along the way. Her lyrics seem to be either dictated by the rhyme scheme, like a 10-year-old’s poetry, or self-contradicting nonsense – what once came across as bracingly inelegant now just feels lazy. Musicians often try to recapture the slippery magic of their initial successes – but few attempt it as explicitly as Nash does here. By doing so, she’s proven the vitality and raggedy charm of her early work is long gone.
