Kate Nash's new album, out today, My Best Friend Is You, has received some mixed reviews. The main concern was that this upbeat pop singer had perhaps suddenly become too eclectic, complex, or ambitious (whereas, perhaps in sexist form, critics have saluted Paul Weller for being just that with his own new major album, Wake Up The Nation). Stuff and nonsense. This is one of the most fun, charming, and even thrilling, pop albums of the last few years, and easily better than her debut, Made of Bricks, which made Nash a star in Britain. If you want to know what meeting a cheeky, smart, sassy, fun-loving and ironic young British woman is like, in today's Broken Britain of 2010, play this record. Nash has effortlessly, but stylishly, used many classic pop song tropes, from riot grrrl, to Bow Wow Wow, to Pixies, to wall of sound, to jangly indie, to power pop - to forge a new and contemporary voice for her generation - a magpie generation to be sure. In the process, she's assembled 13 songs that are, if sometimes unexpected or a little challenging, never less than great to listen to. As she says: I read Glamour and the Guardian, in her stunning spoken word rant (full of sex and vinegar), 'Mansion Song'. Nash has just stepped ahead of her pop grrrl peers with this off-beam masterpiece.
THAT HANDSOME MAN A PERSONAL BRIEF REVIEW BY TODD SWIFT I could lie and claim Larkin, Yeats , or Dylan Thomas most excited me as a young poet, or even Pound or FT Prince - but the truth be told, it was Thom Gunn I first and most loved when I was young. Precisely, I fell in love with his first two collections, written under a formalist, Elizabethan ( Fulke Greville mainly), Yvor Winters triad of influences - uniquely fused with an interest in homerotica, pop culture ( Brando, Elvis , motorcycles). His best poem 'On The Move' is oddly presented here without the quote that began it usually - Man, you gotta go - which I loved. Gunn was - and remains - so thrilling, to me at least, because so odd. His elegance, poise, and intelligence is all about display, about surface - but the surface of a panther, who ripples with strength beneath the skin. With Gunn, you dressed to have sex. Or so I thought. Because I was queer (I maintain the right to lay claim to that
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