Review: Joan APW

Joan As Police Woman unveil new songs

18 April 2008 - At 7:30pm it feels very early in the night to be greeted by a majestic woman in a turban-esqe navy blue hat, long white evening dress and crazy orange platform shoes, sipping from a large teacup of peppermint tea. Joan mentions a few times during the set how she's scared of London, and it does feel like there’s a massive gulf between us ordinary people in the audience and this other-worldly, kooky creature, who could only come from New York.

But a sense of awe and wonderment are exactly the right sentiments to take to a Joan As Police Woman gig. And they're inspired as much by the woman herself as by her music, for Joan has some great lines in stage banter. "Some shoes are just for walking from the dressing room to the stage and that's it," she offers during one quiet moment, and on playing in the intimate Freedom Studios in Camden's Roundhouse she muses that it's weird to be "inside of a square, inside of a circle."

It's lines like this that cause people in the crowd to mutter affectionately, "She's crazy, I love her," Joan describes herself simply as: "naturally psychedelic." And it's that same endearing, off-kilter charm that also makes her music so irresistible. It was the edge of madness and desperation in her voice on the single Christobel in 2006 that elevated that song above your average indie-pop love song; and judging by this gig, there is plenty more of that enticing edge on her second album.

"Inside of a square, inside of a circle"
Joan Wasser

On Start Of My Heart squealing organ sounds and ever so slightly un-harmonic harmonies push the song to the very limits of tunefulness, before Joan and her band reign it back in; and on the rollicking Furious Joan bashes at her keyboard with the rampant abandonment of child, while managing to deliver a serious message about the US Government.

She told 6 Music that her main ambition with this record was to be open and honest, so it makes sense that and all the kooky, playful charm of the Joan we see on stage comes out directly in the songs she plays. Although that musical openness also expresses a darker, more emotional side to Joan.

To Be Lonely is so dramatic and moving that you don't even notice as the rest of the band slip from the stage. And the audience is mesmerised by the mournful and beautiful To Survive, as Joan delivers a stunning vocal performance - her vulnerability clear from the grimaces she pulls as she sings.

By 9pm it's all over, with two months to wait before the album To Survive is out and Joan As Police Woman return to the UK for more gigs. No doubt Joan will be greeted then with the same affection and bemusement that floods the small crowd tonight, and no doubt she'll reward us with the same raw emotion and unconventional charm.

Set list:

To Be Loved
Flushed Chest
Honor My Wishes
To Be Lonely
Holiday
Hard White Wall
Start Of My Heart
Furious
Christobel

Encore:
Eternal Flame
To Survive

Joan returns to the UK in June to play in Glasgow, Birmingham, London and Brighton. To Survive is out on 09 June.

Lucy O'Doherty