Show some emotion. It's an instruction so direct that it reads as something strange and hollow. If you don't already trust Joan Armatrading as an exceptionally forthright huntress and performer, you could mistake those three words [also the title of her fourth album] for the most familiar sort of '70s epigraph….

But Armatrading … has earned the right to be blunt. She is determinedly warm-hearted, with her every move founded upon a sensuality that is just as appealing as (and maybe more trustworthy than) the grabass openness of Bonnie Rait or Maria Muldaur. And her ear-boggling voice is simply the necessary and sufficient instrument for her songs.

Yet this West Indian emigre to London, despite three well-touted albums, is still waiting to break big. Perhaps it's because she is such a willful composer…. [It] is on the stripped-down "Woncha Come On Home" that Armatrading exhibits the virtues she...