Album Review: Superbloom by Jessie Ware
The London singer closes her disco trilogy with immaculate songs to her husband. One of them catches him dancing with someone else.
That! Feels Good! closed a tour where she had her stage—kick lines, sequins, horn stabs, the audience shouting “pleasure is a right” back at her across festival fields. Two disco records in, the mode had worked. A third party record was the obvious next move. Jessie Ware chose to bring the festival home. Superbloom is thirteen songs to a known person, a long marriage played out as a series of gods-and-goddesses scenes. She A&R’d it herself, and Barney Lister produces eight of the thirteen tracks, more than any other name credited. She has said in interviews that what comes after this record will move toward “synth and electronic and kind of blue and crooner-y” territory, which makes Superbloom the last disco-pop record from her for a while. It is her sixth LP, her third consecutive pleasure-mode outing, and the first one written entirely inside her own house.
The person she’s singing to is one person. On What’s Your Pleasure?, the addressee was a stranger across a floor; on That! Feels Good!, the mode was the party itself. Here, the title track’s “Yours since the day you found me” line goes to her husband, and the running conceit is that the couple agrees to pretend, for one night, they haven’t met. “You know the words, so tell me,” she sings on the title track, “how about you bring me to life?”
Track four introduces him by name. Colman Domingo (the Euphoria and Rustin actor, who recorded his part as a voice memo within an hour of Ware sending him the script) speaks the intro of “Automatic” in the voice of what she has called “the love gods,” telling the hearers, “You’ve got a perfect woman.” Ware spends the rest of the song calling him “Mr. Right.” He “lets her lead” and “ain’t ever problematic,” and she sings it like she means it. “Love You For” is the lifetime promise on the next track, and its outro fades on the spoken word “beautiful.”
The bathhouse conceit on “Sauna” lifts straight from Larry Levan’s pre-Studio-54 Continental Baths, the mid-‘70s New York gay-disco scene where a sauna was a club. Stuart Price (who engineered Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor and the Pet Shop Boys’ Behaviour) co-produces with Karma Kid, and Ware sings “Baby, hide in my senses, not here to pretend/I need a wood dropping, God-given love”, on top of heat on the stones.
A Morricone hook shows up on track nine. The “ah-ee-ah-ee-ah” coyote-howl from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme (yes, that one) loops into a dance rhythm on “Ride.” Ware asks for a “stallion who can go all night” over it. Half joke, half structural load-bearing; the cowboy-on-dancefloor fantasy almost requires cowboy music to stand up. Price co-produces “Ride” too, and the heat on both songs simmers in the same room. Bathhouse steamy, saddle greasy.
Karma Kid and Baz Kaye produce “Mr. Valentine” with bongos and an ESG-adjacent mutant-disco pulse. An “aha, okay” call-and-response opens the song:
“He said, ‘Aha, okay, I want you all the way.’
I said, ‘Aha, okay, I want you to tease me.’”
Ware is warming up for “Sauna” and “Ride.” Her refrain repeats the ask, “Show me the magic, dozen red roses surround me.” Then “I want it all the way up” carries the outro. She plays the song silly. The rose and the madness are both on the table.
James Ford produces “Don’t You Know Who I Am?” alone, the only solo production credit on the album outside Karma Kid’s on “Automatic.” Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Florence + the Machine) carries his rock-pop résumé into the song that breaks the partnership. Ware is at a party where the expectations have all been named, champagne, diamond rings, déjà vu, and she spots him dancing with someone else across the room. She confronts him in the chorus:
“Don’t you know who I am?
I’m the love of your life
Fool me once, kiss me twice
We’ve been dancing all night
Don’t you dare say goodbye.”
She forecasts her own absence in the bridge, “You’re gonna miss me in the morning when I’m not inside your bed.” But the shape of the song is unambiguous. He is caught. That break stays open.
At the top of “16 Summers,” a child asks Ware, “Mom?” and then, “Are you jumping, Mommy?” The rest is a ballad she has not written before. She is outside a family scene she is watching in the first verse, “I see a family in the sun out in the garden having fun, but where am I?,” and admits the lie she has told about being away. She does the math out loud in the refrain, “Sixteen summers, is that all I’m gonna get?/It’s so easy to forget, we’re all just passing through,” and the pre-chorus drops it hardest, “I just closed my eyes and now my life’s in double time.” Sixteen summers is the count from birth to roughly age sixteen, before adolescence pulls them away. Ware has three kids. Jon Shave, of Xenomania, co-produces with Lister, and the panic arrives on a pop chorus. That earlier garden conceit doesn’t reach this one. Gods and goddesses have nothing to say to a parent counting.
Ware returns inside the marriage. Tom McFarland of Jungle co-wrote “No Consequences,” and the song argues for a safe place inside the partnership: “I believe I will love you till I die.” “Mon Amour” picks up the same thread.
A stuttering pre-chorus ends the album. Ware clips the same phrase three times before finishing, “mouth, uh.” “Does your body feel it when I think about it?” she asks in the second verse. The answer arrives at the chorus, “Give me more, mon amour, mon amour.” The French she repeats, “shh, j’adore,” is the quietest thing on the record. And the shh is her last instruction. The fade-out loops the title and ends.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Automatic,” “Sauna,” “16 Summers”