Jessie Ware deliberately wanted the opening track of That! Feels Good! to sound like a group of people at an orgy. Featuring the likes of Kylie Minogue, actor Jamie Demetriou, Radio 1 host Clara Amfo, producer Benny Blanco and Ware’s mother (and co-host of the hit podcast Table Manners) Lennie all whispering the album’s title, it has the same brain-scratching satisfaction as an ASMR video, albeit one tempting you into the velveted opulence of Ware’s exceptional fifth album. It’s a record that delights in its author’s joyous liberation: as Ware sings on the title track, “Freedom is a sound / And pleasure is a right!”
Ware is qualified to make such a proclamation. Following the underwhelming adult contemporary safety of her third record, 2017’s Glasshouse, the singer took stock of her career and blew everything up. She secured new management and went into the studio intent on enjoying herself. The result was her lockdown album, 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure?, a sophisticated disco record that that revived Ware’s career and helped reclaim the dance music diva-ship of her early days. The live shows had the same debauched energy as an illicit club night, sweaty and lubricious, Ware wielding a whip on stage, holding court like a ring-leading dominatrix. After the monotonous confinement enforced due to the pandemic, Ware seemed to be encouraging the world to make up for lost time.
That! Feels Good! is couched in the same rapturous hedonism and propelled by breathless ecstasy, Ware inviting you to step into your pleasure. What’s more, she leads by example. “I’m a lover, a freak and a mother / Walking on the line, it’s my human nature / I crave a little danger,” she winks on shimmering satin floorfiller Pearls, before giving you a little push towards the disco ball: “I know you wanna / Go to the moon / But if you don’t go, you’ll never get there.” On Free Yourself, Ware rides bucking pianos, funky bass and Italo disco strings, lassoing together satisfaction and sexual autonomy as she sings: “Why don’t you please yourself? / If it feels so good, then don’t you, baby, don’t you stop.” Meanwhile Beautiful People, with Ware’s grinning self-aware rapping, cowbells and cajoling horn section, prescribes the communion of the dancefloor as medicine for life’s melancholia: “Put the day on ice, pour a cocktail / Mix your joy with misery.”
Ware’s voice has always been her most significant asset and she controls it deftly on That! Feels Good! On tracks such as Free Yourself, Pearls and the whirling Chic-indebted strutter Freak Me Now, Ware revs things up when required, exploiting all aspects of her impressive range from soaring theatricality to smouldering seductress. There’s also a return to the lush aerated delivery found on early songs like Running towards the end of the album: watery synths and an R&B groove cast Lightning in a diffused early morning glow, Ware’s tentative and breathless voice forward in the mix, while the shuffling rhythms, cascading horns, honeyed strings and clavinet of These Lips are all led by her luxe bedroom purr.
Ware really lets rip on the Latin disco of Begin Again, giving the most assured vocal performance of her career towards the song’s climax as she rises into her upper register. “Give me something good that’s even better than it seems,” she demands over tumbling pianos, before lamenting the mundanity and dull tedium of everyday life on the chorus: “Is this my life?” she wonders. “Beginning or end? Can we start again?” If hitting the reset button results in something as carefree, fun and pleasurable as That! Feels Good!, then Jessie Ware might just be on to something.
