Joan As Police Woman/Tony Allen/Dave Okumu

★★★★

The Solution Is Restless PIAS. CD/DL/LP

Well-starred collab yields introspection, bedroom funk and unholy gospels.

In November 2019, six months before his untimely passing, Afrobeat godhead Tony Allen improvised with Dave Okumu (The Invisible) and Joan Wasser (Joan As Police Woman) in a Paris recording studio. Wasser subsequently reworked those tapes into this shadowy, masterful set, the earthy complexity of Allen’s rhythms suiting songs invested with the erotic charge of moral uncertainty and emotional entanglement. Evoking both the agonised grain of Nina Simone and the vulnerable gloss of Dusty Springfield, Wasser’s vocal is similarly attuned to this suite of noirish groove and brooding, understated torch songs, examining all the confounding angles of obsession on Geometry Of You, and recomposing an identity in the company of Damon Albarn on the powerful Get My Bearings. But it’s not all Bergmanesque self-examination: the lithe bedroom funk of Perfect Shade Of Blue makes explicit the carnal undertow bubbling throughout. Stevie Chick