Amy Winehouse: Back to Black
Sunday, 29 Oct 2006 19:48
Back to Black: Experimental and confident
Universal, out October 30th
In a nutshell…
Jazz meets soul over a bottle of wine.
What's it all about?
Addiction to alcohol, marijuana, sex – just about anything you can get hooked on, Amy has been there, written a song about it, and is now looking for something else to feed her dependency. Well, it makes for an interesting record. After a strident opening with (refusing to go to) Rehab, she works through a patchwork of vices and denials and just about every genre going in a self-dramatising sweep of trauma and Tanqueray.
Swept along in the tide of her addictions, over waves of Aretha Franklin influences, her cigarette-tinged voice croons, twists and occasionally screeches to a complement of guitars, trumpets, even the odd flugelhorn. You name it, she's not afraid to use it. Experimental and confident, she flirts variously with R&B, soul and hip hop before returning to her home key: jazz.
Who's it by
The enfant terrible of a drama school better known for turning out performing ponies (oops, popstars) than Marlborough-loving jazz musicians. After deciding early on that she wasn't going to conform to the Sylvia Young school's Billie Piper, Baby Spice etc brand of bland, she cemented her rebel reputation by getting expelled. Why exactly is a mystery, but rumours range from refusing to take out her nose stud to 'failing to apply herself'. Whatever – this girl was never destined for a conventional education, as she tells us in the first 60 seconds of the album. "Didn't get a lot in class – but I know it don't come in a shot glass". So that's all right, then.
Not one for keeping her mouth shut, Winehouse is famed for often being more chip than shoulder and few of her compatriots – and arguably, influences – have been spared her acid. When asked by the Independent on Sunday whether, were she not already famous, she would have tried the Pop Idol route, she immediately launched into a tirade on the evils of judging someone else's music, but ultimately can't help herself, explaining earnestly: "Even though the people who go on those shows are sh*t, it's really damaging to be told that you are."
Listening to her voice, you continually have to carry out the aural equivalent of rubbing your eyes to remind yourself that it's not a seasoned black session singer in a jazz club– but a skinny 22-year-old Jewish girl from Camden. Almost impossible to categorise, as she once boasted, endearingly: "I'm at least a five trick pony".
As an example…
"He walks away
The sun goes down
He takes the day but I'm grown
And (it's ok)
In this blue shade
My tears dry on their own" (Tears Dry On Their Own)
Likelihood of a trip to the Grammys
If you're the betting type, I'd put money on it. This album has already had usually rapacious critics purring over its lush, mellow throatiness and brazen lyrics. Never mind the Mercurys and Brit wins that escaped her last time around – she's more deserving now. Maturity glimmers: this girl is ripe for a hat trick of awards.
What the others say
"Winehouse could release albums of knuckles cracking from here on in: her reputation is already assured." Kitty Empire for the Guardian.
"It should keep popular culture students busy for the next 20 years in the way that Mick Jagger in the mid-Sixties prompted countless theses on the subliminal black person within. Nonetheless it works - even though this area of pop culture has been mined remorselessly for the past 50 years - by dint of its clever melody lines and smart lyrics." The Observer Music Monthly:
"The voice of 2007." MOJO.
So is it any good?
Yes. Back to Black is that rare thing: an album you can listen to from beginning to end, in order, over and over again - and find a new favourite every time.
Strutting, defiant she pokes the finger at past lovers demanding, sweetly, "What kind of f**kery is this?" (Me & Mr Jones) and keeps us waiting four songs before the title track peaks – or plunges – into the crux of her theme. It begins with a pacing, pulsing piano chord before sinking into depression. "I died a hundred times…You go back to her, and I go back to…I go back to…"
Reluctant to accept defeat, resolution is deferred as the "I go back to…" refrain gathers strength until, beaten down to a whisper by the piano, she puts us out of our misery.
Back to…black. Yet, just when she seems ready to pack up her guitar and reach for the nearest bottle, drums kick in with the wistful, resigned Love is A Losing Game, Winehouse's reworking of the archetypal 'getting over him' song. Piling metaphor on top of metaphor; she is relentlessly philosophical. Love is a losing hand, she declares; love is a fate resigned. Love – love is a losing game.
One criticism of the album is that it's too short. After packing 11 songs into just over 34 minutes of alcoholic, iconic crooning she bows out, presumably to go and "smoke [her] home grown". The end result is a taut show reel that leaves us salivating, willing us to press play again – and move from the playfully titled last track 'Addicted' back into 'Rehab'. It's circular, compulsive. Were it not for the amount of bleeps needed – and the difficult of getting a song whose main refrain is "you smoke all my weed man" past the censors – each would be worthy of radio play, especially the motowny, doo woppish, Me & Mr Jones.
Yet it's a little too introspective for the airwaves. Even the cover is dark. Where first album Frank pictured a grinning, pink clad Amy dragging a dog on a lead, this one shows her languid on a chair in an empty classroom, peering moodily out from between gothic fronds.
Well, it is called Back to Black. Noticeably thinner (her shrinking frame has elicited mutterings of 'anorexia' from interviewers) and more angst-stricken, undercutting the powerful, almost masculine voice is a dissonant note of fragility – despite the bold reassurance of lines like "I'll battle till this bitter finale/Just me, my dignity and this guitar case." (Some Unholy War).
Unlike Frank, a bright-eyed newcomer surveying the musical landscape, Back to Black is a leap into the abyss of self-exploration. In contrast to her 2003 debut, there are no jazz standards covered and her writing credits appear on every track, oozing intimacy.
It works: we're poised on the edge of her cliffhanger. Let's just hope she doesn't fall off.
9 /10
Emily Ford
See the video for Amy's new single You Know I'm No Good here
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