Jessie Ware
Tough Love
13 October 2014
PMR/Island/Interscope
2.5 stars out of 5
Jessie Ware’s 2012 debut LP, Devotion, was an interesting and very listenable exercise in soul,
harkening back to the early days of Sade and the quiet storm movement of the ‘70s.
Two years later she gives us her second LP, Tough
Love, and all of the promise of her debut—the idea that Ware might become
this decade’s great English soul singer—turns out to be just wishful thinking. Tough Love isn’t much beyond bland,
derivative, and boring.
Things start out at a very underwhelming pace with the
lukewarm title track, and then fizzle out and die after that. All of the edges
to the production that made Devotion
so listenable are completely absent on Tough
Love. Dave Okumu (of The Invisible) produced ten of the eleven tracks on Devotion, while handling the knobs on
only two of Tough Love’s eleven.
Could this be the reason why the latter is such a dull record? Possibly, though
at this point it’s unlikely that anyone would be still interested enough in
Ware as an artist in her own right to be moved to care. File this one under “L”
for “lost potential.”
reviewed by Richard Krueger
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