Jez Burrows / Dept. of Enthusiasm

24. Songs for the high road
September 6th, 2020

Nadine Shah - Kitchen Sink / Club Cougar (6 Music Live Sessions)
(File under: music, perverts, skronk)

Watch: youtube.com/watch?v=x3DWY-Gihc4 / youtube.com/watch?v=muUfmiIXLn4

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‘Kitchen Sink‘ is a song about coolly sizing up your detractors and swiftly forgetting them. It’s a song for blaring out of open windows as you hurtle along the high road. Everything about it vibrates with infectious confidence: not just the prepared piano, synths, marching drums and handclaps, but Nadine Shah’s expressions and delivery, the way she relishes a couplet like ‘forget about the curtain-twitchers/gossiping boring bunch of bitches’. Yes!

Meanwhile, ‘Club Cougar‘ is slinky and venomous, packed with St. Vincent skronk and a narrator running a gauntlet of perverts and catcallers. Every instrument (played by multiple Ben Hilliers) is a character in its own right—grumbling bass, tabla, and synthesised horns, clangs and radar blips.

It feels like I’ve listened to nothing but these two videos all week. Kitchen Sink, the record both of these songs are taken from, was released back in June and is patiently waiting out there for you to listen.

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