As contradictory as its title, Kate Nash's fifth album is a cinematic fantasy that transcends both place and time, her signature comic British melodrama tumbling through whimsical compositions, big-screen Gilded Age strings, and a sprinkling of raw 2000s American folk. Enamoringly influenced by the audacity of Hollywood aesthetics, 9 Sad Symphonies was born out of years of splitting time between London and Los Angeles, but the two influences never clash, rather they gently intertwine with one another. It's not shocking, for example, to hear the celebrated period violins and country fiddle of “Millions of Heartbeats” flow over the garage beats and Clean Bandit-esque strings of “Wasteman,” or the poetic New England pastiche and blood-soaked romance of “Space Odyssey 2001.” Meanwhile, Kate's familiar melancholy and indie-rock flair is well suited to the transatlantic aesthetic, with predictable British humour seeping throughout: “You're the bread and the honey / And I'm the bank,” she sings on “Vampire,” lazily crowing over the sounds of a tambourine in a drunken Western. “The vicar caught me masturbating in church.”
Her fifth album is a departure from the rigid starkness of her earlier work, but it retains a sure compositional footing and unconventional love-song sensibility, underpinned by solitary strings that are as devastating as they are triumphant. Here, she has cracked the code. 9 Sad Symphonies is an album of time-traveling, Merry Happy-esque fables, in which Kate portrays an Englishwoman in an Americanized world, making cinematic epics of her romantic turmoil and healing her emotional exaggerations with ease. It's a long-awaited return from Britain's most emotive, comically deadpan pop artist.