Nash was working at River Island when she fell down some stairs and broke her foot. In the three weeks she had to spend recovering, she picked up a bass guitar and started playing. By the time she had recovered enough to start working again, she had a few songs written and ready for performance, and she… didn't need to start working again. She quit her job, released her first single "Caroline's A Victim" and started her new career as a musician. Allen, hearing the single, put Nash in her Myspace friends list and from there; she went stellar. After the success of second single Foundations, she got picked up by a record company and an album followed very quickly afterwards. This one, Made Of Bricks -- And it's NOT like Lily Allen.

The album starts off with a brief moment of strangeness. "Play". A buffed up drumkit starts slamming on a basic drumbeat, whilst Kate sings variations of the phrase "I like to play" in a deep, slightly creepy voice. It's not creepy in a scary sort of way, mind, but when she finishes by saying "I play all day in my room", you start to wonder how innocent the song is meant to be. Then again, that may just be me. There's a little riff on a guitar and some old-style music hall keyboards, but it's just an into for "Foundations", by far her most well known song. Foundations is all about the feeling of entrapment felt when you release a relationship is on the rocks. Even though you don't love each other anymore, it's hard to give up on what was once a relationship, and you can't bring yourself to break up. Nash's songwriting on the album flits around, but on occasion she can nail a feeling perfectly, and during the chorus when she says "my fingertips are holding on to the cracks in our foundations" she's onto a winner. The song itself seems bright and breezy, with a chipper piano and handclaps lighting the song forward, but the downbeat tone of the lyrics make the song something to work on several different levels. During the song she does drift into cockney vocal mannerisms, but it's generally for effect - Nash doesn't live through her songs, she instead creates stories (like Spektor - see, they really are similar! I don't make these comparisons up at random!) and her characters "act" them. Seeing as she's from London, it's no great leap for her characters to also be from the capital either, okay? I'm glad that's cleared up.

There are two songs which are singled out as ballads on the main part of the album, being "We Get On" and "The Nicest Thing". You can tell they're the ballads because they only have piano and no bouncy drumbeats or flouncy weird bits. Of the two, We Get On easily stands up as the best, because it doesn't take itself seriously. Musically there's little to put between them, being two piano ballads, but The Nicest Thing has a forced vocal that highlights too much yelping for my taste. Again, this may just be my opinion, but there's a time and a place for yelping, as Regina has previously taught us (seriously guys - it's an amazing comparison I've made here, you should give me an award for it or something). Both songs have the same message, that of a girl trying to get noticed by her crush, and it's strange that both made the cut here. If Nash had been given more time to make her album, perhaps she could've written something different, but as it is… we'll have to wait for album 2.

Unless you're me, in which case "Merry Happy" will be your most frequent point of call. It's a song that I very much like because it's dippy and upbeat and has a lot of creativity. The opening lyrics "watching me like you never watched no-one/don't tell me you didn't try and check out my bum" don't give much hope at the start, but the persistent piano roll and the slow drum beat give the song a strength that means it gets over this initial struggle. The song actually gets more rewarding with each new listen to it, with the repetitive mantra of the chorus becoming more and more memorable and enjoyable. She even manages to get the great line "Chatting on the phone/You can't take back those hours/But I won't regret 'cos you can grow flowers/from where dirt used to be" which is pretty wonderful, really. The optimism that shines out from this actually quite sombre-sounding number is also present in "Mariella" and "Skeleton Song", both of which share the trait of being as mad as a hatter. In the latter, Nash talks to an imaginary childhood friend - the skeleton - against a backdrop of some schizophrenic piano (can I describe it like that?) It's loopy, but has a surprisingly heartfelt chorus which even has some violins in it and stuff. It's a pretty epic song too, lasting a long while and running the length of different feelings. Like Mariella, it's about being a child at heart. Both songs are upbeat but mental, and Mariella in particular features some great vocal ticks and oddball phrases and is highly enjoyable.