When last we heard from Joan Wasser, she was mourning her mother’s death from cancer (the second major tragedy of her life – she was Jeff Buckley’s girlfriend at the time of his death). It was early 2008 and she had just put out maudlin-running-to-dreary To Survive, a bereavement record so suffused in heartache it was, in all honsety, difficult to sit through in one go.
Returning after the longest hiatus of her career, the sometime Antony Hegarty/Rufus Wainwright collaborator is unabashedly in reboot mode. Sensual and soulful, Joan 2.0 steps away from the cool-to-the-touch torch songs with which she was previously synonymous, instead embracing a steamy, almost vampy persona. This turns out to be a surprisingly canny move: ‘The Magic’ is a dignified evocation of romantic desire; ‘Run For Love’ a cooing love song of the sort she could never quite bring herself to write in the past. Even better is ‘The Human Condition’, a slow-melt soul belter for which she has apparently resurrected Barry White on backing vocals. After To Survive, Wasser junked an album worth of recordings, feeling the down-tempo music didn’t reflect where she was at emotionally. Sultry and affirmative, The Deep Field is more than the reinvention nobody saw coming. It’s Wasser’s finest release yet. More plough to her elbow.