Superbloom is the third chapter in Jessie Ware’s transformation, over the last six years, into a self-proclaimed and full-blown disco diva. How does it differ from 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? and 2023’s That! Feels Good!? Arguably, it leans further into Seventies stylings, as opposed to the more electronically updated direction of its predecessors. It is also juicy with sex and fleshy queer nightclub shenanigans.
Ware is a hugely successful podcaster (Table Manners, with her mum) so she probably doesn’t need to make music anymore. This has clearly freed up her approach and she sounds like she’s having a grand old time, channelling the sound and spirit of multiple artists via a solid coterie of successful producers, pop and dance, including Stuart Price.
Initially, Superbloom inhabits a lush orchestral soul-dance sound redolent of Minnie Ripperton and Gamble & Huff; smooth, sensually melted, a million miles from Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia snap. There’s even a come-to-bed, Isaac Hayes-style voiceover from Hollywood star Colman Domingo on “Automatic “.
Then the sex ramps up, notably on three of the album's highlights; the Eighties electro-funkin’ “Ride”, which nicks Ennio Morricone’s theme to The Good The Bad and The Ugly, the preposterous “Sauna”, which takes us straight back to Larry Levan DJing at New York’s pre-AIDS Continental Bathhouse (“I need a wood-choppin’ guy giving love”!), and the kitschy, catchy, bongo-fuelled “Mr Valentine”, which is touched with the “mutant disco” of ESG and the like.
After this section, Ware dips hither and thither, from an effective Gloria Gaynor pastiche ("Don't You Know Who I Am?") to the Roberta Flack-meets-Helen Reddy stylings of the maudlin, motherhood-themed piano ballad “16 Summers”. Right to the final “Mon Amour” she’s riding well-crafted, boisterous rhythms that grip the listener and may propel some of them to the dancefloor.
If Superbloom proves to be the final part of a disco trilogy, Jessie Ware can stand proud beside a lively, consistent and saucy body of work.
Below: Watch the video for "Ride" by Jessie Ware
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