Joan As Police Woman at The Button Factory | Review

Joan As Police Woman at the Button Factory, Dublin, 30th April 2014

Joan Wasser has squeezed a lot into her twenty year career: from her early work with the Dambuilders in the early ‘90s to Anthony and the Johnsons at the start of the century via Black Beetle. In 2006 she released ‘Real Life’ under the moniker Joan As Police Woman.

It is as Joan As Police Woman that Wasser takes to the Button Factory stage on Wednesday night, following on from the soulful support of Londoner Jake Isaac. Dressed in a sparkly golden top and shoes that seem to be borrowed from Napoleon Dynamite, with added heels, she enters with her band, themselves seemingly bedecked in clothes from an army surplus shop. Guitarist Matt White particularly looks like someone who took to music to help forget the horrors of Vietnam.

The four-piece, as they appear onstage, make an inauspicious start to proceedings, with What Would You Do and recent single Holy City, together with its bitterly disappointing chorus, failing to convince.

The same could be said for the first half of Good Together, for which Wasser stands out from behind her keyboard to take a powerful stance, guitar slung over her shoulder. As the song progresses the sense of tension escalates with a growing choral power. When White’s guitar cracks through the rest of the noise, it’s powerful and exhilarating; an early highlight in the show.

It’s a shame, then, that those that follow Good Together are, again, somewhat disappointing. Get Direct and The Ride (stop your giggling) demonstrate Wasser’s vocal talents but leave no more lasting impact.

Christobel, a single from 2006, again goes some distance to restoring a flow to proceedings. This version though is a million miles from the upbeat single/album version. Here, it is played at an apocalyptic pace, building slowly and growing in tension as atmosphere as it goes. Indeed, it seems to share more with Radiohead’s Climbing Up The Walls than Christobel as we know it.

Once again though, it proves a false glimpse at redemption, and the set plods along unconvincingly until Ask Me sees the band exit the stage. The band are tight live, but they create very little atmosphere as they perform. Even Wasser’s audience interaction seems to be uncomfortable.

Shame, the first song of the encore, offers no more than was on offer before, but The Magic lifts things. It shows Wasser’s voice at its most powerful and it finally gets traction with the crowd.

The highlight of the show, however, is The Classic. All four band members step out from behind their instruments and the perform the title track to the latest album as an a cappella doo-wop track. It’s the one piece of true invention on show this evening.

Closing with Your Song – Wasser playing solo and offering the most intimate moment of the show – and the band are done for the evening. It was a show where the high points really make a mark but are just too few and far between to carry the rest of the show. It had such a strong ending it’s a shame that the rest of the show didn’t live up to it.