Both Joan as Police Woman albums offer engaging NPR-friendly pop music, the type that blurs the very thin line separating beloved cred-laden ladies like Neko Case and Cat Power from contentious Adult Contemporary staples like Norah Jones and Sarah McLachlan. Both albums focus squarely on Joan Wasser's smoky croon, and her sumptuous arrangements. In addition, both albums feature Wasser dueting with one of her former collaborators-- swap out Rufus Wainwright with Antony (of ...and the Johnsons fame) on the new disc, and it might be easy to mistake To Survive with her first record. Unfortunately, the qualities that To Survive shares with its predecessors belies its shortcomings-- what once sounded novel and fresh comes off as staid and static the second time around.
To be fair, Wasser's songcraft is admirable-- at its best, like on the laid-back "To Be Loved", a simple chord change coupled with the right phrase can open up the entire song. For every successful track like that, however, there's one like "Furious", an awkward attempt to talk tough which comes off as fussy and overwrought-- "Are you not furious enough?" she asks throughout as the flitting backing vocals and bassy instrumentation plays a sort of distracting shell game with the listener. When Wasser opts to forgo ornate arrangements, the results are equally mixed-- where a piano-driven ballad like "To Be Lonely" (with a sly nod to "The Long and Winding Road" in its intro) sounds overcooked despite its bare structure, the addition of a few strings to the lone piano in title track creates a gorgeous backdrop for Wasser's unaffected singing.
This song-to-song inconsistency is exacerbated by the album's wonky pacing. It starts strong (with the pensive "Honor Wishes"), and ends on a high note (with the title track leading into "To America", Wasser's duet with Wainwright). Unfortunately, the middle of the album, burdened with turgid low points like the aforementioned "Furious" and the cold implored passions of "Hard White Wall", drags it down into a tasteful morass that Wasser would be best to avoid. It's that sonic purgatory where music seems at once both adventurous and unimaginative, where a song takes too much effort to say very little, where the look and the sound quality stand in for anything substantive. Joan As Police Woman's debut flirted along the edge of this gulf, and while it fell in as often as it escaped unscathed, it had the benefit of being a debut. To hear the second album make the same mistakes in a different, albeit more assured, manner isn't surprising so much as it's disappointing.
