Amy Winehouse
Lioness: Hidden Treasures
The closeness of death permeates even the sunniest tracks on Amy Winehouse's posthumous disc, Lioness: Hidden Treasures.
Released with the consent of the late singer's family, Lioness is a stitched-together grab bag of demos, outtakes and alternate versions meant to paper over the fact that, despite the Grammy-winning success of Winehouse's 2007 sophomore album Back to Black, her tumultuous personal life precluded the creation of a proper follow-up.
Her collaborators, producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi, sifted through hours of recordings to assemble Lioness. All proceeds from album sales are earmarked for the Amy Winehouse Foundation.
There aren't any truly startling moments here, although Winehouse's loose sprint through The Girl From Ipanema hints at avenues tragically unexplored. But there are near-constant reminders of what was lost when the singer died suddenly in July from, as the Brits say, "misadventure," or alcohol poisoning, according to the official coroner report.
Take Half Time, which conjures visions of Dallas' own Erykah Badu and suggests that Winehouse could've enjoyed a long, satisfying career in R&B, pivoting away from the revivalist jazz-pop with which she made her name.
Her smoky, vivid alto caresses the lyrics, wrapping around them without ever quite fully taking hold. The phrasing could perhaps be called lazy, but there's too much passion evident beneath the apparent surface disinterest.
The inclusion of first passes at songs from what would become Back to Black also proves instructive: Winehouse's default preference is torchy, borderline doped-up-sounding renditions of tunes that would later be somewhat sped up. At heart, she possessed a sentimental weakness for the sort of records easily dismissed in this age of hip, detached irony. Wake Up Alone is wonderfully sensuous, even as it aches for a long-gone lover; Tears Dry could've been cut in the mid-'70s, during soul music's golden era. Winehouse has long been hailed as an old soul merely repurposing the past, and Lioness does nothing to dissuade that opinion. To Ronson and Remi's credit, there are no attempts to make Winehouse any more than what she was, no unnecessary gilding of the lily. Winehouse's formidable skills, reflected in her full-bore approach to her life as well as her music, are left to be judged on their own merits.
The 27-year-old was, for a brief, shining moment, one of pop's most promising voices, but she couldn't overcome her personal demons, the very same dark urges that fueled her art. It's a vicious paradox that has claimed many before her.
The album's sad reason for existence overwhelms any rational attempt to appreciate it as a cohesive whole -- the Achilles' heel of any posthumous effort.
The profound sense of loss, the infuriating circumstances surrounding such a promising talent's early demise and the knowledge that, barring any crass attempts to further profit from the late singer, this will likely be the last official release the world ever hears from Winehouse all weigh down Lioness, making it a funereal trudge through the scraps left behind much, much too soon.
