Album Review: Kate Nash: Girl Talk

“I changed my mind, I changed my face, I can change all the time, so give me space,” screeches Kate Nash on OH, a track off her third album Girl Talk. It’s a highly appropriate plea from the 25-year-old British songstress given the uncharted territory she’s navigating. Nash has cast off her red locks for a black and white do, her party dresses for a leather jacket, formed an all-girl band and picked up the electric bass. Rebelling against the trademark cutesy girl pop melodies that put her on the map, Nash is taking on a grungy, rockabilly-meets-garage-pop, all grrrl power sound. Watch out, Patriarchy.

Case in point is the track Sister, with Nash howling, “She wanted to be my lover but my heart was with another.” While the lyrical content is not too far from what Nash would have adorably speak-sung in 2007, save the reference to a possible lesbian affair, it’s the delivery that imbues the song with a whole new attitude. Nash’s guttural vocals channel her inner Courtney Love (circa-’94) as she unravels emotionally and viscerally. “Being ripped away from you was like being ripped away from the womb.” It’s a raw side to the usually varnished Nash we haven’t seen before. And it’s very compelling.

Nash is no stranger to subverting expectations. Following disappointing sales from 2010’s My Best Friend Is You, she was dropped by Universal Music Group subsidiary label Fiction Records. It was scary for a few days, Nash told the BBC, then she went on to get shit done herself, building her own label Have 10p Records. In 2012 she wrote, recorded and released the punk-odyssey Under-Estimate The Girl within 24 hours. It was her first public foray into the punk game, foretelling the album to come, and it sent the Internet ablaze; pundits decreeing Nash had no right to go punk and the twitterverse branding the track as a joke. Nash was still able to muster up enough fan support managing to crowd-fund Girl Talk online and released the album independently via her own label.

Musically, Girl Talk is all over the place and it’s clear the 25-year old Nash is still figuring out who she wants to be. O My God! is vintage Kate Nash, a lighthearted cockney croon for an old flame. There’s the angsty cry for help Part Heart, the racing-feminist call to riot All Talk, the Tarantino inspired Death Proof, and the questionable Disney-eque orchestral album closing. Nash’s somewhat nonchalant rapping on Rap for Rejection can come across as clichéd and reactive. On the track she complains that music magazines with the “real cool bands” are kept in the stands with men’s magazines, “Are you trying to tell me sexism doesn’t exist? / Well if it doesn’t exist then what the fuck is this?” It’s surface-level stuff. But it should strike a chord with a fanbase who are probably also figuring out how to grow up and navigate feminism in 2013.

Nash has always been a relatable pop-star: the kind of artist teenage girls can envisage as their bestie. And while it’s unclear how the pop-star’s diehard fan base will react to this new direction, it wouldn’t be the worst thing for pop music if the bones of her message got through. While Katy Perry eschews the word “feminist”, Nash wears it as a badge of honour. “You got a problem with me/ cause I’m a girl/ I’m a feminist and if that offends you/ then fuck you.” It’s a far and somewhat brash jump from her previous taunts, which involved telling a guy his friends were “fitter”. But it’s a message that mainstream pop too often ignores.