Jessie Ware – Superbloom
On Superbloom, Jessie Ware goes toe-to-toe with the law of diminishing returns
The third album of Jessie Ware’s high-camp disco revival suffers from a glut of fan service and, with it, far too little actual fun. 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? invited the listener into a COVID-era kitchen disco: lush, impeccably judged, a genuinely brilliant adult companion to Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia. Its follow-up, That! Feels Good!, found Ware, James Ford and Stuart Price pushing further into the joke and the spectacle, with enough appetite left in the tank to produce real alchemy: Free Yourself, Begin Again, Pearls.
By this formula's third outing on Superbloom, the creative tyres sound to have, somewhat, worn thin. It’s overindulgent, erring on dutiful rather than louche: too orthodox to pull off its winks to camera on Sauna, liable to veer into the wince-inducingly saccharine on 16 Summers, and at points flatly suffering from a paucity of good ideas (looking at you, the Morricone-sampling Ride). Xenomania workhorse Jon Shave can’t quite emulate Price on I Could Get Used to This, leaving Ware’s beautiful vocal lethargy with too little momentum to pull the mix out of its mid-tempo mire. Altogether, it has the faintly dispiriting sheen of something commissioned by its own success.
Ware is deft enough that the album still plays best when it coalesces her 2010s crooner poise with the 2020s reassertion of her pop bona fides. Automatic rides the record’s intemperance to the point of sumptuousness, while Mr Valentine is a soaring evocation of Donna Summer atop a pattering, tom-heavy percussion line that brilliantly recalls the Salsoul Orchestra.
Listen to: Automatic, Sauna, Mr Valentine