The Words I Never Found To Say - Fast Food by Nadine Shah

I have eschewed the typical 'review upon release' thing in this instance, as otherwise this review might have been nothing more than the phrase "Oh God!" repeated 2000 times. This piece (and it's writer) needed some time to collect itself. Having heard Stealing Cars at the turn of 2014 on 6 Music and continually thinking "that's great, I must check her out properly" but then doing NOTHING of the sort, I may have for once caught rather than avoided a bullet. A dull, joyless Saturday night turned into a virtual epiphany as I decided to finally 'have a gander at that lass on You Tube'. I proceeded to focus on 3 or 4 videos which I then spent several hours watching, and watching, and watching......and then became the kind of evangelical loon who started to write things on social media like "the first real torch singer of the 21st Century" and that one of her b-sides was "the best expression of desire and heartbreak since Love Is A Losing Game". I wouldn't write anything as ridiculously unconsidered and overblown as that now, obviously......

I realised as a result that I had arrived a bit late, but the fact that there was also a first album and EP's to devour was but an extra treat. We have in Nadine Shah a truly individual voice - I'm thinking Bjork, Tanya Donnelly, Kristin Hersh, Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, Robert Smith, Kate Bush, Jonsi......no-one sounds like Nadine Shah and despite early linkages to Nina Simone and PJ Harvey, she sounds like no-one else either. She expresses her roots (Wearside-born and bred of Pakistani father and Norweigian mother) in how she sings and writes; a flat refusal to unflatten her vowel sounds or mid-atlanticise her pronounciation, and it's not novelty or affectation, it's an expression of who she is. Song titles such as Cannit Leave or Never Tell Me Mam sit alongside lyrics like "Passing the time away, cinema twice a day now / I've nowt left to see" and "I am yours to take, be my playmate" in all their dialectal glory. And so to her second album, which in all honesty had me in quite unneccessary levels of anticipation which then in turn just gave way to paranoia because I was acutely aware of how much I wanted to like this record - which has left me clutching desperately to my objectivity like you would to your dignity if you had just bought a selfie stick. Fast Food was written in a shorter period of time than the debut Love Your Dum and Mad, which is usually the case and often a cause of problems for a second record - Kate Bush (I'm still not comparing, read on...) is a great example this as Lionheart was rushed out to piggyback on the success of The Kick Inside, and yet was inherently less satisfying as a result. However in this instance it seems to have done no harm at all - indeed Shah herself recently said when interviewed by Lauren Laverne that she had enjoyed relative brevity of the process (and even has the songs for the next album written already). Looking at the plethora of extra tracks that have already accompanied her singles and the you tube clips of songs not officially available, maybe she's just one of them songwriting machines in the ilk of Prince, Ryan Adams, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Sufjan Stevens et al. Shah's songs (co-written with Ben Hillier) are dense, woven, insistent, alluring, atmospheric, pristine and hypnotic. However that's not to say they are in any sense lightweight - a recent show I took in at Manchester's Deaf Institute contained moments of sonic aggression which were truly visceral, as if I was at a Valentines or Mary Chain gig (and yet the voice still soared above it all with majestic ease). She has spoken many times about the simplicity of what you can create from the piano despite it appearing so complex - the songs build on simple layers and envelope into collages both beguiling and disquieting in equal measure. There are certain templates created in tone and tempo but each then grows and develops an identity of it's own, which is a further testament to the quality of the writing. These songs aren't there to batter you over the head however overwhelming some of her vocal peformances are......they are designed to beguile and seduce, like emotional saboteurs. Divided for example is a truly beautiful examination of a divergent relationship and the complex emotions that ensue...."I didn't ask you to need me / I never begged you please stay........and now you should be gone dear, go you from me......". It captures vividly the push and pull of knowing where your own heart is leading yet being equally aware of what following that might be doing to someone else.

Closer Living opens with the line "You ask how this is living when I'm bored from dawn to dusk" and discusses how people want "those filthy moments, with the cutesy stuff at home", indicating a keen eye for the minutiae and the contradictions of human relationships.

Stealing Cars is nothing short of genius - musically I keep hearing Document/Green-era REM, slivers of Jeff Buckley's Grace, shades of Elbow.... and I hear something new everytime; another stellar vocal performance, soaring melodically, and with dazzling lyrics Oh it's criminal, I'm stealing cars in my dreams that neither you or I can drive Passing the time away, cinema twice a day now I've nowt left to see Put the guilt in me, my anxiety Check your pulse when I speak See me through it all The restless, drenched-in-cold-sweat nights The words I never found to say Masking humility, here they're looking for me, now You're my hideaway Take the covers from me, naked for all to see You handed me over So check your pulse when I speak ..the best circuitously dissonant dissection of frustration, longing and betrayal since....well, that's quite specific so I can't think of an exact equivalent right now but you get the drift.

(Brighton April 2015)

The title track stomps around like a junkyard/glam masterclass, as if someone morphed Tom Waits with The Sweet, and Fool - which I wasn't keen on at first, maybe just as it was the next thing I heard after Stealing Cars and so would always suffer unfairly - has a spikily insistent riff and understated melody that eventually gets you. Matador starts on another slow, acoustic build up, atmospheric, brooding with growls of guitar infusing the originally gentle environment with menace....all that the first album would have you expect but less piano driven and more angular and gnarly. Much the same can be said of The Gin One which is even a bit post-punky in the guitars - a little bit of early 80's Cure, a bit more REM in how the bass and guitars intertwine melodically and the rest fits around it. Big Hands takes us back a little more into the terrain of the first album, structurally, but ends up propulsed by rumbling, skittish drums and more red hot needles of piercing guitar. Essentially, it has clearly been a very good thing to not have gone massive immediately - Nadine Shah is so much more than I imagine Florence or Lana or Laura will ever amount to, as she has been able to develop away from the pressures of expectation and mass appeal. Yes, the test maintains as she grows in popularity, but the identity has been forged, the writing and performing skills enhanced; Nadine Shah is the realest of deals, and we should be grateful, in the current pop climate, to have anyone even remotely like her.

Oh and after the Manchester show my mate and I met her and she was dead canny and that....