Jessie Ware – Tough Love
On Devotion Dave Okumu’s precise use of echo meant Jessie Ware registered as a fiction of warmth and compression, a star in a distant galaxy just noticeable to the naked eye. The presets and jagged synth lines still keep Ware from turning into Annie Lennox, but barely, which should warn all concerned; the moment Lennox believed the press about her Great Voice she stopped writing garish and histrionic and awesome songs about domination and self-invention. Ware isn’t interested in a Savage; for her, Diva serves as template. Well, fine. Unfolding with the premise that refinement can be abstracted beyond definition, Tough Love is as solid as Devotion; but where the latter had nullities at worst Tough Love has a couple of outright horrors and no dance cuts as undeniable as extra track “Imagine It Was Us.” The church choir on the Sam Smith collaboration “Say You Love Me” is respectability that Ware doesn’t need. But Miguel’s “#Beautiful” chords and backing vocals enliven “You and I (Forever)”; this kid loves singing – and loves singing with women – so much that he should stop returning Wale and J. Cole’s phone numbers. The title track pushes her range to its limit, with “The Beautiful Ones”‘ Linn drum as a floor. If her people want a radio hit, let radio come to her. Offer them “Champagne Kisses.” Watch the bubbles rise.
Tough Love is available now as import and in the United States on Oct. 24.
Lydia Loveless – Somewhere Else
I like the mix: an electric rhythm, played presumably by the singer herself, harnessed to a thin and undistinguished groove that gains momentum as it becomes clear that she’s recreating the experience of one of her live shows. The onetime leader of a punk band at fourteen understands momentum enough to sometimes get so carried away by words that, on her ode to beautiful young “Chris Isaak,” she falls down a flight of stairs. Stoking a lust to which she yields with no mediation except logorrhea, Loveless has presence, a nasal voice, and tunes, and when these fail there’s that guitar around her neck needing a good scrubbing. “Wine Lips” sounds like it tastes. Critics have noted the Lucinda Williams parallels; in the opener “Really Want to See You” she snorts blow at a party, finds an eight ball while cleaning her room, and daydreams about more wine lips, all because he got married last June and she heard “I Just Wanted to See You So Bad”. I hear another influence. Somewhere Else sounds like a good Paul Westerberg album: what 14 Songs would’ve sounded like if it were good. Doomed youth is her subject; she’s young enough to know she’s object too. So the song about Verlaine shooting Rimbaud because he loved him is silly. But when she closes her eyes and burrows into Kirsty MacColl’s “They Don’t Know” she suggests a passing acquaintance with what the older poet felt for the young genius. Needing secrets is as much a lifeline as the electric guitar.
Humanizing The Vacuum 