The big personality makes her first great record.
Written: Apr 27 '07 (Updated Apr 27 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: One of the most interesting artists currently in music at the top of her game.
Cons: Some of the songs aren't up to the standard of the rest.
The Bottom Line: In twenty years time, every two bit Badu will be referencing this album as their saviour. This generation's Miseducation? I'd say it's better.
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| kookytree's Full Review: Back to Black by Amy Winehouse |
Perhaps the most surprising musical success story of the past year is that of Amy Winehouse. First debuting in late 2003 as a bolshy, buxom North London teenager in love with jazz and inspired by hip hop, her first album Frank was received warmly by critics but failed to make quite the impact many expected.
Two years later and Amy seemed to have disappeared altogether. Apart from a comical picture of her wasted at an Arctic Monkeys gig and the reassurance she was busily recording her second album, her fans saw or heard little. Then THAT picture emerged of an emaciated, pallid Amy peppered with ugly tattoos and drenched in eyeliner. It was a stark contrast to the cackling good time girl who had once sung so fully of one night stands and substandard men. I began to worry.
I shouldn't have.
Back To Black is an album so fine as to make the debut that impressed me so much three years ago look rather drizzly and insubstantial in comparison; a mere sketch of potential now realised. The jazz so integral to Winehouse's former musical identity has been dropped for the melodrama and emotional acuity of mid 20th Century girl groups, and it's a splendid fit.
UK lead single Rehab was a monster radio hit that led to my former little secret becoming a tabloid staple, album chart champion and even a favourite of Perez bloody Hilton. It's one of those songs that seems instantly familiar, like a lost Northern soul classic suddenly rediscovered. Sassy brass, jolly horns and reliance on refrain should seem perverse against this pitiful tale of one girl's very personal battle with herself, but instead perfectly convey the oddly triumphant tone in Winehouse's petulant protectiveness of her own black despondency. "I didn't get a lot in class, but I know it don't come in a shot glass", Winehouse winks, through streaked mascara. Top 10 smashes rarely come this potent, this unscripted.
This voice is an incredible thing- messy and decadent, a cigarette in bed, a chocolate bar melting in a back pocket. But what has always struck me about Amy is her lyrical candour, her ability to detach herself from the wreck of her own misery and punch her entire experience into succinct, often droll lines. It's a gift that means Back To Black is, like most great soul music, steeped in romantic ruin and self despair, but never wallowing or self indulgent. As a songwriter she becomes her own rather merciless biographer, and every song is one of clean, keen clarity.
On the self-explanatory You Know I'm No Good, she saunters through her own aimless infidelities with studiedly laconic disinterest, playing with her own self destructiveness like a strand of hair. It's a sultry listen, the voice at its most evocative as it simmers over a simple, bassy drum beat and Ronson's beloved horns.
The title track is perhaps the disc's most arresting listen, a dramatically atmospheric anthem for the broken hearted that is half Shirley Bassey Bond theme, half Shangri Las Technicolor weepie. Producer Mark Ronson excels himself with an opulent pallet of sound, incorporating ethereal choirs of ooing Amys, sinister touches of spaghetti western guitar and what sounds like a full orchestra, whilst maintaining an elegant control. It's a song dripping with menace, grand tragedy, cinema- you won't hear a finer single in 2007.
There's an interesting tension to this music. So often the sound emulates classic, familiar territory, but the lyrics are so brutal, so base, so pointedly 21st Century, as to seem deliberate provocation. Witness Me & Mr Jones, sonically a straight-forward throwback to smoky '40s jazz that nonetheless concerns an imagined relationship with Amy's favourite rapper, Nas, opens with a bellowed, 'What kind of f*ckery are we!? Nowadays you don't mean dick to me' and is as brash and brassy as its most memorable line, 'Aside from Sammy you're my best black Jew'.
Addicted is another case in point. A lilting, summery jaunt, the laid back vibe is belied by its flippantly scathing depiction of a cheap acquaintance who smokes all Amy's weed- a big no no as it does 'more than any dick did'. Not exactly Billie Holiday, eh? This is perhaps the only time Back To Black truly falters- it feels gimmicky and slight; the sort of attention seeking silliness Amy has demonstrably grown out of by now.
She may have largely disowned her debut but for fans of that record there are points of familiarity. The lyricism remains sharp and confessional, the mix of modern sensibility and old time influence is still present, and Winehouse is as blunt and facetiously crude as ever. Despite that Back To Black is undeniably a different beast; richer, more satisfying, imbued with palpable maturity. Once a contemptuous firecracker of a songwriter, wincing at the ineptitude of others and high on the possibilities of a young voice often beyond her control, Winehouse is now a pragmatic woman who has loved and lost and all the rest. The anger and throwaway humour of Frank is replaced with deflation and darkness. Where she once wrote about wannabe WAGs and the death of a pet bird, the twin minefields of dysfunctional relationships and her own fractured psyche dominate this record.
That's not to say it's all bleak. Tears Dry On My Own sees Winehouse muse over the corpse of a dead love affair and achieve a sense of tart optimism. 'We could've never had it all; we had to hit a wall' she sighs- lyrics she would have snapped three years ago. The heavy borrowing from Ain't No Mountain High Enough feels appropriate; in its Diane Warren-esque chorus, the song kisses that sort of pure, relevatory high.
He Can Only Hold Her bears the same sense of resigned perspective, a short but sweet tale of a mismatched couple narrated by a finger wagging, teeth sucking Amy at her lightest and most playful. You can almost hear her smiling as she sings, again providing tension as beneath all the warm horns this sounds like a sad tale. The contemplative Just Friends is more straightforwardly placid, to the point that the attention wanders. It does serve, however, as proof positive that whilst many seem morbidly attached to the image of Winehouse as a doomed genius with a death clock ticking in her beehive, caked in whisky, there's more light and shade to this woman than heartache and hangovers.
That said, the album's at its most potent when Amy is at her most dejected. Wake Up Alone is, for my money, the standout of the disc. It's incredibly sad, and incredibly beautiful, that voice casting itself over misery like a big, gloomy moon aching for daybreak. 'That silent sense of content everyone gets/Just disappears soon as the sun sets', she hums morosely, a meditative disclosure of lonesomeness so perfect as to achieve the purity of a hymn.
Supposedly designed to feel as if it was recorded in two weeks, Back To Black is a tight, contained record. I said in my review of Frank that it felt like a person on a disc; this is more a mindset divulged. You'll come out feeling you know more about Winehouse and what goes on in her head (and bed) than you do your close friends. Not only that, but she achieves that perhaps superior aim of capturing little pieces of your own life, your own bedroom. The isolation of Wake Up Alone, the desolation of Love Is A Losing Game, the false dawn of He Can Only Hold Her; these are things we all know, we all share. For a 22 year old jazz Jew from Enfield, tapping into that sort of collective consciousness on her second record is no mean feat. I'm reminded of that moment in Capote when Phillip Seymour Hoffman says that, when he thinks of how good his book could be, he can't breathe. I think of Amy Winehouse in 15 years time, and I feel the same.
See also:
My embarrassingly gushy (and ooold) review of Amy's debut album, Frank
Recommended:
Yes
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kookytree
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Reviews written: 52
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mais lindo que michael jackson!
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