Album: Kate Nash

From Paul Anka's emasculated covers of Little Richard to today's legion of lower-division Libertines wannabes, it is an immutable law of pop music that successful innovation will be plundered by inferior talents. In this case, Kate Nash is merely an ersatz Lily Allen, which renders Made of Bricks several degrees of separation short of satisfactory, Nash betraying no more demanding ambition than acquisition of the epithet "sassy". Compared to her, Allen seems a veritable multi-faceted talent able to sing and write a proper song. "Birds" and "Nicest Thing" aren't really songs, just drab backing vamps with spoken narratives delivered in an irritating mockney patois, whose limp, sweary-girl affectations and clumsy pseudo-proletarian references to cheese on toast, cups of tea, and to someone being "up yourself all the time" all have the grating clang of inauthenticity. Nash is at her most ridiculous relating the misplaced teenage infatuation of "We Get On", a parade of circumlocutious inanity that brings to mind a middle-class Vicky Pollard. Pole position for worst album of the year.

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'Shit Song'