Music review: Joan As Police Woman

The common criticism of Joan Wasser is that she slinks too close to AOR blandness; that she is, essentially, alt-Adele.

Yet you'd be unlikely to hear the mighty Ms Adkins sing, as Wasser does on the psychedelically angry clatter of The Silence: ``My body, my choice, her body, her choice''.

A smoothie she may be, but Wasser has spikes.

She is in a languorous, smoky zone for her fifth album as Joan As Police Woman, with an added '70s sheen.

Her edgily lascivious high notes light up soft, reverby spaces, while Talk About It Later gets funky, and Steed (for Jean Genet) dabs hints of Parliament falsetto weirdness on hot pulse points.

Lush lead single Warning Bell finds Wasser lamenting her lack of romantic wariness but diving back in anyway. 

Joan As Police Woman. Damned Devotion. Pias.

★★★★

- by Emily Mackay/Guardian News & Media
 

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