It helps that Ware is a true believer, underscoring That! Feels Good!’s title track with a command that’s almost militant: “Freedom is a sound, and pleasure is a right. Do it again.” Like Donna Summer before her, she eliminates the distance between dancefloor ecstasy and sexual pleasure, suggesting an imperceptible difference between the two. With the thrust of funk bass and spontaneous yelps, she also conjures the physical release of a Soul Train line, transported by syncopation. And when she belts, “Why don’t you please yourself? If it feels so good then don’t you, baby! Don’t you stop!” she revels in the sensual prerogative of adult womanhood, of spiritual excess, staking out her own joyful territory. (She also suggests, over the driving piano of “Free Yourself,” that rapture doesn’t necessarily require a partner.) Her confidence fizzes and levitates with an assuredness that feels deserved but hard-won. “I’ve always relied on people that believe in me because maybe I haven’t believed in myself enough,” she told Pitchfork of her past experiences with music industry men, “but now, actually, I do, which is really wonderful.”
Having reached the point where she can own her vast talent, she’s in a position to extend the favor. On “Beautiful People,” she drops a perfect pride anthem, channeling her existential angst—“I wake up in the morning and I ask myself, ‘What am I doing on this planet?’”—into a purple leather outfit and a cocktail party. “Mix your joy with misery,” she reasons, before deciding that “beautiful people are everywhere.” It’s a vibrant exhortation fueled by cowbell and the band’s robust horn section, mining the eternal solution to life’s indignities—the dancefloor, with friends—and a song dying for a drag queen to lip-sync it. (Whither Sasha Colby!)
Largely, though, Ware’s focus is on the corporeal, celebrating self-determination and sexual versatility with cheeky metaphor: bottles that pop, lips that are underworked, and the mother of all innuendo, pearls. (She also works in time-tested double entendres of food and humping, linking her career interests by invoking limes, strawberries, and pink champagne.) On “Pearls,” she conjures the soul arias of Chaka Khan with another paean to dancing until your insecurities are moot and your clothes are in a pile. “Freak Me Now” ups the cosmopolitan allure by introducing French touch and a distinctly computerized synth whorl to the equation. While it steps away slightly from the ’70s lane Ware has so carefully carved, it sits comfortably among the analog piano and string jaunts. The only other track outside That! Feels Good!’s classic disco-ball rubric is “Lightning,” where Rhodes, strings, and layered harmonies sit next to a pitch-shifted vocal flourish and a boom-bap beat that zooms you right ahead to 2016. It’s a lovely song because Ware is an exceptional vocalist, but it takes you out of the fantasy, which any actor or drag queen can tell you is a mortal mistake.
But overall, That! Feels Good! stays focused on a mission that never feels like a chore. In its relatively brief 40-minute runtime, Ware takes her task extremely seriously, but she’s unencumbered by its immensity; actually, it seems to unleash her, as she experiments with vocal tricks—smoky, Grace Jonesian talk-singing; spirit-catching falsetto that’ll absolutely melt off your Halston—with the sure knowledge that the good-time, nighttime prima donna was always who she was meant to be.
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