The New Kate Nash Album: My Best Friend Is You

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.

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CLIVE WILMER'S THOM GUNN SELECTED POEMS IS A MUST-READ

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

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se. What do I mean by smart?

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

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