Joan Wasser’s aura gets tacky between your fingers. Soon the floor is greasy underfoot and it covers tables and chairs like petals. Such a heady flume of atmosphere encirles Belfast’s most striking of venues, that when it’s all over, the night air hits harder on re-entry to earth. And it’s all down to Wasser’s positively incandescent presence at the front of the room.
The whole thing with this woman, besides her uncommon beauty, the transfixing, troubled manner and her consistently underestimated musical sophistication, is how touching and even daunting an experience it is to be exposed to an artist who isn’t just performing but remembering. And sometimes it’s hard to be a woman.
With an onstage persona that is half ditzy moonbeam and half scuzzy Lower East Side dilettante, her crystalline, masterfully guided singing voice squeezes the retrograde torch songs until they stall and die. Her most affecting songs are the ones left hanging in uncertainty, with Joan on the verge of giving herself over to a love that terrifies or tentatively proclaiming a final and total submission to another and awaiting his answer.
Whether it be the solid-gold Banshee soul of Hendrix cover ‘Fire’, the fanciful paean to Whitney Houston ‘Eternal Flame’, a spell for sexual slavery (‘Take Me’), or the dreamy lassitude of jazz-tinged ‘The Ride’, each offering speaks of a woman followed by herself, falling victim to her own complexities, and always on the advent of true love.
In this way Joan As Police Woman is a female artist in the classic 20th century tradition, who like her spiritual forebears Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, or Kate Bush, is comprised of equal parts resolve and vulnerability and eccentric but real, and it’s easy to understand her ascendance as a gay icon.
As the pitifully lonely ‘To Survive’ spikes, she reopens her eyes to reveal tears. It’s such a special moment that it looks almost stage managed. With such naked emotion beating down on us, the urge is to look away, if only you could. Compare her to her skeezy Brit counterparts and it’s difficult to be anything other than passionate for the true class that Joan Wasser is exporting this decade. John Calvert
Posted on: 27th January 2010
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