Crack

10/20

It’s a strange one, this. We’ve been told by Amy’s old man that it was released after deciding that the material was “comparable” to her previous output, but in what sense he means “comparable” remains unclear. The songs certainly sound finished rather than patched together but, by and large, the standard falls way short of the high points reached on Frank and Back in Black. The proportion of filler is crazy, with covers you’ve heard before and alternate version of old songs. By no stretch is this her ‘final album’, and shame on anyone who describes it as such. Neither is it ‘sketches’ of another album, like Jeff Buckley’s My Sweetheart the Drunk. Make no mistake, it’s an odds and sods collection.

But there is value here, at points. Between the Cheats is a defiantly delivered and heartbreaking moment of soulful brilliance, while Halftime is a lovely, smoky jazz number. The vocal performance throughout is strong, so there’s nothing to tarnish the reputation of one of the finest voices of recent memory. But at the same time, there’s very little here to dissuade that nagging cynicism about this collection flopping onto the shelves of Tesco a couple of weeks before Christmas.

And there’s really no excuse for the intrusion of Nas on Like Smoke. After a fractured Winehouse coos that “like smoke, I hang around in the unbalanced”, his declaration that “like smoke, girls linger round a player” feels jarringly inappropriate in the circumstances, like boasting about the size of your dick at a wake. It’s a perfect illustration of how each time you begin to wonder if Lioness may have been an exercise worth pursuing, you get knocked back by another wave of disappointment.

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Words: Geraint Davies