The common criticism of Joan Wasser is that she slinks too close to AOR blandness; that she is, essentially, alt-Adele. Yet with all due kudos to the mighty Ms Adkins, you’d be unlikely to hear her sing, as Wasser does on the psychedelically angry clatter of The Silence: “My body, my choice, her body, her choice”. An irrepressible smoothie she may be, but like her airier Canadian contemporary Feist, she’s got spikes.
After poppy diversions for 2014’s The Classic and Let It Be You, her 2016 collaboration with Benjamin Lazar Davis, Wasser is back in a more characteristically languorous, smoky zone for her fifth album as Joan As Police Woman, with an added 70s sheen. Her edgily lascivious high notes light up Godley and Creme-y soft, reverby spaces on Wonderful and Tell Me. Talk About It Later, meanwhile, gets funky, and Steed (for Jean Genet) positively filthy, dabbing hints of Parliament falsetto weirdness on hot pulse points. Lushly regretful lead single Warning Bell finds Wasser lamenting her lack of romantic wariness but diving back in anyway. Damned Devotion embraces the messy as well as the smooth, and the balance here is as perfect as Wasser’s ever likely to strike.
