Jessie Ware
“Sweetest Song”
Tough Love (out 10.21 on PMR)
I wrote last week about my anxiety about the second LP from TP uber-fave Jessie Ware, but this lovelorn slow-burner certainly helps curb some of it. Much of the Londoner’s best work is her most restrained, when she forsakes the over the top, TV commercial chorus for the stifled and the subtle. “Sweetest Song” is good Jessie at her best, as she smears her expressive, low-register vocal over the kind of sparse, sultry arrangement that helped make her debut one of the best albums of that year. Let’s hope the rest of Tough Love follows suit.