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Rating: Good |
Everyone wants a new Amy Winehouse album as good as Back to Black. It would be great if, for example, the British soul revivalist had actually finished, or at least sketched out, a gem of an album during the turbulent last four years of her life. But she didn't: there was her collaboration with Mark Ronson on "Valerie," and the new track and a half that appeared last year on Lioness: Hidden Treasures, which was otherwise filled with alternative versions, earlier outtakes, and covers. A live album showcasing her best work would also be welcome. But her performances after Back to Black were relatively few and, reportedly, mostly quite unreliable.
So – maybe a set of radio recordings? That's something, right? At the BBC selects 48 minutes of tracks from live on-stage and live-in-the-studio broadcasts. It adds two previously unreleased tracks to Winehouse's discography: covers of the standards "I Should Care" and "Lullaby of Birdland," from which Winehouse borrowed a bit for her own "October Song." And it's arranged in order of her original album release rather than performance order – all the Frank tracks, then all the Back to Black tracks, then the other tracks. That compensates for the fact that only two tracks were recorded during the difficult 2007-2011 period: a garish "Just Friends" and a stripped-down "Love Is a Losing Game," both from 2009.
Winehouse, however, always had a tendency to oversing on stage. Especially when she had a large audience to address, it was too easy for her to succumb to the vocal tics—the vague consonants, the hyper-articulated melisma, the extravagant embellishments, the imitations of Billie Holiday's timbre—that she could control on her better studio recordings, and it often led to her botching her own lyrics. (She pronounces the last word of "F%#k Me Pumps" here as "pwuuuups.")
However, the versions of Winehouse's repertoire on the BBC audio disc are almost all sloppy than their studio counterparts, and she rarely succeeds in revealing anything we didn't already know about her songs. And every time she twists a line or mentions her vices, she's a stinging reminder that she spent most of her all-too-brief career making her audience complicit in her self-destruction. This set is not without significance, but it's by no means another great Amy Winehouse album. We'll never get that.
= Full Album Play List =
= Track List =
