Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 12/6/06
Label: Reveal

Heaven knows what prompted her to opt for that clunky alias - which suggests a Nazi transsexual hawking banal synth pop - but the light hitherto hiding under Joan Wasser's solo bushel deserves to shine brighter than a thousand suns.

The New York resident boasts an impressive CV: trained as a classical violinist; was a founding member of Boston alterno rockers The Dambuilders (who folded in 1997); played in criminally underrated, moody, alt blues band Those Bastard Souls (alongside genial Flaming Lips dude Steven Drozd); is a member of both Rufus and Martha Wainwright's touring bands; has recorded / played live with Sparklehorse, Elton John, Tanya Donelly, Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds, Sheryl Crow and Antony And The Johnsons, among others; and was a long-term squeeze of Jeff Buckley.

Wasser, however, is not just the foil for a bunch of (more) famous names, but a songwriter of subtle skill who favours the casually understated confession and is blessed with a burnt caramel-toned alto of swoon-inducing soulfulness. The coup "Real Life" pulls off is to refract the hazy romanticism of Joni Mitchell's peerless "Hejira" through the lenses of alt. country and the American modern jazz songbook without once resorting to pastiche or paean. The odd rococo flourish points out her affinity with Mr Wainwright's aesthetic and occasionally (the title track, "The Ride", "Anyone") you suspect Wasser is k.d .lang's long lost twin, but the shots Joan As Police Woman calls are very much her own.

"I Defy" (to which Antony Hegarty lends his distinctively warbly tones) has a breezy, modern jazz tone and massed vocals effect suggesting the flutter of sparrows in a dust bath, but even that isn't the album's strongest cut. Contenders for that honour are the divinely winnowing title track, the lazy, sun-glazed "The Ride" - in which Wasser's voice gently climbs the scale as if borne on a perfumed air drift - and "Save Me", where her husky warmth is offset with a deliciously lurching piano motif. Other flashes of Wasser's striking talent are the carny flavour that seeps into "Flushed Chest", the jazzy counterpoint at the core of "We Don't Own It" and the cantering "Christobel", with its frantically sawing violin and darkly urgent plea of "why won't you just fall in love with me?"

WPC Wasser, we have - head over heels, in fact. Get yourself a copy of "Real Life", Katie Melua, Norah Jones, Corinne Bailey Rae et al. And weep.

    by Sharon O'Connell