Jessie Ware - What's Your Pleasure? review | Laura Snapes' album of the week

The Guardian 0

(Virgin)
Without the burden of reinvention, Ware’s fourth album of defiantly sexy, plush post-disco is a flirtatious joy

The comfort zone has a bad reputation. No artist wants to be seen to be creatively complacent, or uncompetitive, a state of affairs that’s much more acute for women, as Taylor Swift once observed: “Reinvent yourself but only in a way that we find to be equally comforting and a challenge for you.” It’s worse yet again for older female musicians, expected to prove that they’re still as ambitious as their younger peers or to gracefully disappear into Radio 2. That dynamic plays out vividly in Jessie Ware’s career. Made with cutting-edge dance producers, her debut album, 2012’s Devotion, earned her comparisons to Frank Ocean’s elegant R&B. She was keen to maintain tastemaker approval on 2014’s Tough Love, but by 2017’s Glasshouse – released after the birth of her first child – she was shooting for the mainstream, hiring blue-chip songwriters and laughing off her old ambitions as a cocktail of snobbery and fear. The ensuing gigs were so disastrous that her mum told her to quit.

Related: Jessie Ware: ‘Music was my bread and butter. Now it isn’t, which has made it more enjoyable'