Unlike the nationalistic hype twisting around rising British acts before her, the U.K. buzz on Kate Nash has not been singularly gushing and adulatory. When Made of Bricks hit London shelves in August, the Guardian panned it as lyrically weak and gratingly underdeveloped. But despite the critical warning flags—including a dismissive sniff from Pitchfork and a musical dissection in the New Yorker—Kate Nash has, based on her MySpace-to-riches bio and a track on Grey’s Anatomy, become popular fodder for quirk-loving indie America. Unfortunately, iTunes charting and oaths of fealty from starved Regina Spektor fans can’t make this lyrically weak and (at times) gratingly underdeveloped record worthy of unqualified recommendation. Those factors do, on the other hand, recognize Nash’s roundly likable sound and blend of pop experimentation with accessible charm.

“Grating” is an excellent word choice for some of this material, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Nash has a great voice (very reminiscent of Spektor), a pleasant sound, and a charmingly cute perspective on life (though her life experience so far seems to primarily consist of rejecting lousy boyfriends.) And “underdeveloped” refers to artistic experience and market timing rather than talent: several of Nash’s songs rollick with promise, and for a 20-year-old who began playing instruments and performing only two years ago, promise is nothing to sneeze at. “Foundations,” with its coy, rapid-fire lyrics, treats a degenerating relationship with amusing realism and suggests a wealth of well-worded witticism to be revealed in the future (“Then I’ll use that voice that you find annoying/And say something like ‘Yeah, intelligent input darling’/Why don’t you just have another beer then?”).

Like everything else that plays the cute-‘n-quirky card—from film performances to pop songs—Kate Nash’s persona is both her blessing and her curse, the element that renders her a burgeoning curiosity and a juvenile annoyance. “Mouthwash” has been picked on for its painfully banal lines (“And I use mouthwash/Sometimes I floss/I got a family/And I drink cups of tea”), but I’m inclined to think it works. It opens with plunky piano chords, adds toe-tapping drums, follows a roller-coaster melody that’s never boring for a second, then swells into rolling arpeggios and trumpeting horns that sound as if she rolled her piano into the midst of a Go! Team rehearsal. “Pumpkin Soup” is flouncy piano pop with lo-fi jazz production: trumpet bursts and an echoed chorus. Bizarre but wholly amusing, “Skeleton Song” describes a girl in love with an imaginary skeleton, to the tune of the best melody on the record.

Elsewhere, Nash’s oddity becomes obnoxious: the insufferable “Mariella” races to a raucous conclusion, with Nash yapping above a tangle of simple piano and a droning, straightforward beat. And while “S*** Song (Full of It)” does some great work integrating synth blasts with its drums, the inane (and profane) lyrics do it no favors. (This record is for mature audiences only). Her few attempts at a wink-wink bad-girl cuteness are painfully ill-advised, coming off much more schlockily tedious than cleverly insulting.

For a debut coming so shortly into her musical education, Kate Nash has the heads of many a solo songwriter attempting to fuel unique songs with their own offbeat perspective. But it’s likely her musical personality that’s winning the fans; Nash’s not-quite-good-natured, not-quite-girl-power lyrics regularly fall short of mining quirky observations from the banal situations she painstakingly describes. Her take on the North-London twenty-something, thus, isn’t particularly inspired (“I like to play”) or corrective (“I am not in love/I just want to be touched”). And only some slick production makes Made of Bricks the partial success that it is.

Download: “Foundations,” “Mouthwash,” “Pumpkin Soup.”