Album Review - “Superbloom” by Jessie Ware
Every Friday, Spotify releases its “New Music Friday” playlist, highlighting drops from the most popular artists in the world. Using this playlist, I usually select one song to review. However, I came across Superbloom, the latest album by Jessie Ware, a pop-adjacent album reminding the world that, vocal-for-vocal, few singers can come close to touching the songstress in terms of sheer vocal power and songwriting.
For the past decade, it was near-impossible to find a singer with a more complete package than Jessie Ware, a one-of-a-kind light-hearted voice who possesses superb writing skills given her background as a journalist, and an ear for instrumentals that rivals the Laufey’s of the world. And also, she’s British! Not sure why, but that usually gives a singer additional points.
The beauty of Superbloom is that every song is rightfully blessed with Intellectual integrity, a near-impossible quality in art that often finds itself infected with AI in one way or another. Through the album’s 42-minute run, the blends of instrumental twists and turns, such as the shifting “Automatic,” which blends into the “Chariots of Love Interlude” and “Sauna,” are a treat that no computer should be able to mask; that’s pure audio brilliance that finds its way throughout every pore of this project.
The album is also brilliantly put together, bathed in a disco aesthetic and splashed with the occasional love-starved R&B principles; the overall record possesses an eccentric quality that transforms any topic, whether feelings of grief, love, happiness, or hope, into a near dance-floor anthem. This is true for the majority of the album with the exception being the tear-jerking worthy “16 Summers.”
As an artist, Jessie, who once found herself amidst a large contemporary pop landscape of the 2010s, such as Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber, finds herself a veteran in the industry; now producing albums that contend with the top of the 2020s crop of the Charli XCXs and Olivia Rodrigo’s. However, this project shows that she is more than talented enough to outpace them all, and do so to the tune of a two-stepping drum beat. Jessie Ware, the latest legend in pop.
