Joan As Police Woman comes from some realm between vintage bar-room jazz and the horrifically-named "Freak Folk". It's a strange place which flowers with unlikely petals, glimmering bright in the surrounding darkness like a bats' cave full of lights.
She's been about for a while, popping up here and there in the right or wrong esoteric places, but Flushed Chest is the first thing I've actually sat down and listened to with all functions intact. Where have I been? The piano is played like a demon's tool in the dark, she sings like the devil's medicine, and by the end I want to worship her from the bottom of a whisky bottle.
"Barbed beauty is the new punk rock," she says, and at the moment I'm at liberty to agree. While Joanna Newsom and Josephine Foster beguile from afar, Joan is an intrigue to ponder on our own shores.
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