Damned Devotion

Romantically confused, Wasser has drawn strength, inspiration and guidance from people through music to better understand relationships on this album. Damned Devotion is a brilliant self-help resource.

Damned Devotion embraces the messy as well as the smooth, and the balance here is as perfect as Wasser’s ever likely to strike.

“Valid Jagger” and the Genet-referencing “Steed” are suffused with sensuous carnal urgency, while the turmoil of “Talk About It Later” is perfectly captured in the eerie, keening mellotronic strings riding its lumpy bump’n’grind.

Throughout, Joan still sounds as bewitched, bothered and bewildered by love, a timeless sensation that transcends digital intervention. [Mar 2018, p.94]

Damned Devotion is her fifth album, and feels like a kind of reckoning, a taking stock, and a work of renewed focus. If 2014's The Classic was a high-concept exercise in soul pastiche, here she returns to her core territory, forensically charting the human heart, tracking the course of midlife love, lust and loss. [Mar 2018, p.20]

This is a beautiful, soul-searching record and the one that Joan Wasser has spent her whole life building up to. [Mar 2018, p.110]

Her sixth solo set steers her back to what she’s best at: exquisite, tenderly fraught torch-soul songs of compulsion and regret, where the lights are dimmed, the feelings run deep and the hushed elasticity of her voice commands close attention.

While it sometimes isn’t the smoothest of rides, there’s more than enough here to help maintain a sense of devotion to Wasser’s work.