FEATURE:
Revisiting...
Kate Nash - Yesterday Was Forever
___________
FOLLOWING the more Rock-orientated sound…
PHOTO CREDIT: Jenn Five for DIY
of 2013’s Girl Talk, Kate Nash’s fourth studio album, Yesterday Was Forever, returned more to her Indie roots. That said, I feel the album is not easy to define in terms of a single sound. Also, it was very underrated when it came out. Some felt that there were not many standout songs, whilst others were quicker to praise a great album from Nash. Released on 30th March, 2018, I wanted to revisit an album that one does not hear played too much now. It is well worth digging out and listening to! I am going to get to a couple of the more positive reviews that, in my view, showcase some of Nash’s best work. She has talked about new music and, after a couple of singles last year, we may see a fifth studio album quite soon. DIY spoke with Nash in March 2018 ahead of the release of Yesterday Was Forever:
“It’s this simultaneous sense of emotional vulnerability and righteous empowerment that runs through both Kate’s general speech and the high-octane technicolour gut-punch of her new album. An infectious burst of everything at once, you sense that if the singing and the acting all somehow went to pot, she could carve out a pretty good line in motivational speaking. “I think I’m strong and stubborn and I’m really silly and I like to laugh a lot and I like to dance and I’m very emotional and very melancholy and I can take things way too seriously, but then I can also just laugh through everything anyway,” she muses, trying to dissect her own particular personal blend. “It’s like I’m an old woman who’s looking back on her life out of a window and it’s raining outside, but I’m also a child all dressed up in mismatched colours who’s cut her own fringe and eaten loads of sweets,” she decides. “Those are my two personalities I think.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Jenn Five for DIY
All these myriad elements seep their way into ‘Yesterday Was Forever’ – from the formative questioning of opener ‘Life In Pink’ (“Am I a person yet?”) to the heart-flip passion of ‘Body Heat’, ‘Hate You’’s middle finger up or the blissed-out sweetness of ‘My Little Alien’. Musically, it encompasses everything from the poppier storytelling of old to the riot grrl vocals of 2013’s ‘Girl Talk’. “It feels like all of my sounds together; it seems to have slotted into one shape somehow. It’s like the Megatron or something,” she laughs. And with a vague emotional narrative (flushed romantic beginnings lead to shitty heartache and then redemptive reclamation), it’s an album that encourages the same self-belief as its author. “There’s been a storyline in my life that’s been going on for the past few years and I feel like it came to a head last summer. I think letting go is really important because I’m a fucking crab, a Cancer baby, moon child and I was just like, ‘No! Don’t leave!’ But you’ve got to let go,” she nods. “It’s putting yourself first and understanding that if you see a vision of your future that’s positive and something that you want, then you actually have to make that happen.”
Undeniably, Kate is someone who practices what she preaches. When it came to recording ‘Yesterday Was Forever’, the singer put herself on the line and raised the money via Kickstarter – an industry-swerving tactic placing her back in the hands of the fans, like her early days. Now, she’s also carving out a second string to her bow as Rhonda Richardson in GLOW: a liberating new career path that’s giving her life in all sorts of ways. “As a girl you’re always being told to take up a small amount of space and cross your legs and not touch your vagina and be quiet. But in wrestling it’s like, everything you’ve been told that you’re not supposed to do your whole life, this is the opposite of that,” she says. “Now is the time to be big, take up space, use your strength, use your power. It’s amazing what you can do with your human self and that’s what everybody needs to be taught: that just being yourself is fucking great and you can do so much with that”.
At fourteen tracks, maybe Yesterday Was Forever is a smidge too long. That is the only criticism I can levy at the album. Beginning with the tremendous Life in Pink, there is a lot to love through the album. The Line of Best Fit notes how Nash’s sound has changed through the years:
“On her debut, Made of Bricks, she delivered an album of clever, wordy indie pop; on her second, My Best Friend is You, the tunes were slicker but the lyrics seemed to lack the cerebral tone of the first record, and on her most recent, Girl Talk, she abandoned any notions of finesse or polish and went straight for the jugular with anxious, ra,w garage-y Rawk.
However, last year Nash emerged from the cocoon with the EP Agenda, which seemed to be the culmination of all of her personae. It was rough-edged, sharp pop, with a saccharine sweetness, all delivered with a knowing wink. It sounded like she’d made a breakthrough – as though this was, finally, truly, her.
For this record, Nash draws on a mixture of 90s alt. riffs, fuck-you attitude and brash, surprisingly poetic lyrics. It’s closer to Alanis Morisette than Adele; and there are hints of PJ Harvey’s ragged confessionals and Liz Phair’s playful ditties.
Album standout “Call Me” cleverly segues from a rubbery reggae beat into a glorious chorus. “Take Away” features a sharp, angular New Wave guitar line that hints at The Cars’ driving melodicism and The Strokes’ chiming indie rock.
“Drink About You” has some hard-hitting self-analysis – the exact kind you’re faced with after a night of drunken reminiscing. It has a rapid, clench-jaw punk tempo that Nash tempers with sweet, syrupy vocals. The riff hits hard, but she makes her voice the ointment for the bruise.
“Karaoke Kiss” veers uncomfortably close to Taylor Swift’s “Style” but manages to just pull it off, while the roaring guitar of “Twisted Up” evokes the Pixies in their mid-era prime (or Wolf Alice, if you’re after modern reference points)”.
Before signing off, there is another review that I want to highlight. DIY noted how it was a little tragic that Nash had to crowdfund Yesterday Was Forever. One would think that an artist of such calibre would have labels bidding for her music! In any case, what we get on her fourth album is brilliant. DIY noted how Nash’s lyrics especially stood out:
“It’s a sad fact of the music industry that Kate Nash – all-round bright spark, actor, and the genius behind the undisputed greatest pop song of 2007, ‘Foundations’ – needed a Kickstarter campaign to fund her fourth album. But it’s also a sign of the unrelenting hard work and ‘go get ‘em’ attitude that she holds. ‘Yesterday Was Forever’ comes eleven years in for Kate, but it’s an album as courageous and fun as any debut.
The fourteen tracks here are pleasingly pop-led, but that doesn’t make them samey. Guitar-driven ‘Life in Pink’ is brazen, ‘Call Me’ holds a catchy backbeat which burgeons into a full-on singalong chorus, and ‘My Little Alien’ is a smooth ditty which looks far beyond planet Earth.
There’s something in Kate’s rhyming couplets – the ingenuity of which is comparable only to King of Sombre Couplets, Sufjan Stevens – that sets off her lyrics. Her rhymes feel so easy, but their meanings remain stark and honest. “Well I wish that I could take you to another time, where everything was cool and my mental health was fine,” she sings on ‘Life in Pink,’ managing whimsy and punch-in-the-face frankness all at once. Standout ‘Body Heat’ is a straight-faced love song about someone who makes “my dopamine levels go crazy.” “Baby you can steal my sheets / I can live off your body heat,” she sings, a sugary-sweet romance sung with sincerity.
For all the trials and tribulations of relationships, its Kate’s insistence on making it as a musician that has stuck around. “Music is the only one / Music is by my side / Music will never leave / To the music I’ll die,” she sings on piano-led ballad ‘To the Music I Belong.’ Songs about how much a singer loves singing can be, well, trite at the very least. But the startling openness with which Kate writes is nothing but warming”.
I would recommend people listen to Kate Nash’s Yesterday Was Forever. Stronger than many reviewers gave it credit for, it is an album that should be played and explored more now. It has some great cuts that people definitely need to hear. I am sure we will hear more from Nash very soon. The London-born artist always delivers something interesting through her music. Yesterday Was Forever is an album that I was eager…
TO revisit.