AMY WINEHOUSE - Back To Black – Deluxe Edition

It's a matter of quality. There's no other explanation. Why is everyone going crazy for the record by this twenty-three-year-old working-class heroine (her father's a cab driver) transplanted to Camden? This time the simplest, most obvious answer holds true: because it's an almost perfect piece of work. A record so beautiful and so meticulously crafted down to its smallest sonic detail that it deserved, like an instant classic, a timely reissue complete with bonus tracks and unreleased material in the very same year it came out.

An excellent choice, the uniform, impenetrable black of the cover for an album whose very title spells out its unrepeatable and necessary musical trajectory: “Back To Black”. That's exactly what this is about: a return to the truest black, a journey through the almost infinite expressive possibilities of a sound firmly rooted in the Fifties and Sixties, in that Stax/Motown pairing that time doesn't seem to have touched in the slightest. So this is a record that's beautiful and enjoyable above all on a strictly musical level, beyond the often cumbersome contradictions of a figure not everyone can stomach.

Amy Winehouse. They'll tell you her music is “radio-friendly” and “commercial” (words and concepts that feel ever more worn-out and anachronistic, now that buying a record has become a form of senseless economic self-harm and radio stations consequently nurture an ever greater distrust of music), they'll tell you that for the past year the girl has definitively given up on her own clear-headedness, that she's the new Pete Doherty, that God is dead and that everyone steals the same way.

If you can, and if you still care about your own ears, don't believe them. Don't believe the cynicism (and perhaps the intellectual conformism) of those whose trade is cynicism itself; don't believe them also because this Winehouse is more cynical than they are — just read what she writes in her songs. So cynical that her talent matters more to whoever is listening to it right now than it does to her.

Ultimately, it's by listening to tracks like the devastating triptych of “Back To Black”, “Love Is A Losing Game” and “Tears Dry On Their Own” that you start to understand why you've spent entire years of your life compulsively listening to stacks of CDs every week, instead of learning to tie your shoelaces and buy a car. Songs that reconcile you with the healing power of pop music, and perhaps even more so with the inescapable truth of a voice and a face — a voice that is a face. And it's the voice itself that really deserves discussion: cantankerous, unkempt, quarrelsome, bruised by scratches and scars; yet, despite everything, a voice as clear, luminous and comforting as few others, one that renews and pays tribute to a glorious, cross-cutting tradition (that of the various Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, but also the Ronettes and the Supremes) while grafting it onto the sensibility of illustrious contemporaries like Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu.

But, as already mentioned, the musical setting contributes in no trivial way to the overall quality of the record. Credit then to producers Mark Ronson (increasingly on the rise, partly thanks to the success of this very album) and Salaam Remi, who managed to give the songs' sound a character that is certainly strongly classic, yet always original and coherent in the compositional choices made, building sumptuous yet rock-solid backdrops against which Winehouse can effortlessly dramatize, through her voice, the unresolved drama of pitch-black love affairs. Notable are the boogie textures of the opening “Rehab” and “You Know I'm No Good”, anchored to an unmistakably hip-hop rhythmic platform, made all the richer by a horn section that drapes its swing counterpoints over melodies and choral geometries that are always perfectly in sync.

In “Just Friends” the tension dissolves into a voluptuous, sweltering reggae languor, while tracks like “Me e Mr. Jones”, “Some Unholy War” or the already mentioned “Love Is A Losing Game” and “Tears Dry On Your Own” unroll the lovingly worn wallpaper of all those fabulous (just ask the Pipettes) girl groups of Spectorian memory, which Winehouse must have loved a great deal, given how she now gives back all their magic through dreamy arrangements and instrumental textures that reach, in “Wake Up Alone” and “Addicted”, results of truly enviable measure and balance.

As for the second disc included in this new edition of the album, there's no doubt that its reason for existing lies mainly in the need to capitalize (and cash in) as much as possible on the media interest Winehouse enjoys at this moment. However, the material included is certainly not leftovers or second choices — quite the opposite.

It opens with a cover of “Valerie” by Liverpool's Zutons (already featured on Mark Ronson's album “Version”), which in all likelihood surpasses the already remarkable original version and stands as an almost irrefutable argument against anyone still inclined to question our heroine's vocal gifts. Then there are covers, from Sam Cooke (“Cupid”) to a spine-tingling demo version of “Love Is A Losing Game” and a few other delicacies I'll leave for the reader to discover and savor. A record that is already the dream — indeed, the erotic obsession — of pop music lovers the world over.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

06/12/2007