Pictured: Joan As Police Woman, the sort who partners up with Jackie Chan, not the Steven Seagal type.
The album, Real Life starts out with it’s title track gently lilting up and down a grand piano. It’s a quiet moment, but not in the way of a dirty basement recording, more like the quiet, introspective song in the middle of a musical about a woman who really, really likes… police work?
Anyway, Joan Wasser (frontwoman for JAPW) has lived enough life to successfully carry any off broadway musical that she’d care to. Besides being the girlfriend to Jeff Buckley, Wasser has created quite a career as a indie-violin-sideman-vixen.
Real Life is very much a soul album as much as it is an indie rock album. Think Cat Power soul, not Motown. There’s been an influx in the indie rock scene of white girls who love to write slow and sad soul songs, but Wasser’s scratchy alto has just enough grit and toughness to make her suffering believable. It also doesn’t hurt that her boyfriend walked into a river and drowned himself. That’s enough to give you plenty of suffering “cred” in my book.
A lot of Real Life’s tracks are forgettable. This doesn’t mean they’re unlistenable, it just means that there isn’t enough to distinguish one slow piano jam from another. They’re all good, and they all showcase Wasser’s gruff vocals by never building too loud, and only ever so often dropping to a whispered string part.
In the end, Real Life sounds like a cd that Callista Flockhart would put on while curling up on a sofa with red wine and all of her neurotic awfulness spread out before her. If you’re all about chill out soul, check it out. If you’re all about red wine and being idiosyncratic, check it out (but also stop it, no one likes a fidgeter). If you’re not either of these things, then stop reading this and get in touch with your feelings and a boxed set of the first three seasons of Ally Mcbeal. That curly haired guy was a total puss.
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