Amy Winehouse – Frank Review

Few titles get better than this. Amy Winehouse pays tribute to a great influence, Frank Sinatra, and sets the mood for her openness and blunt honesty. Frank is just that. Modernisations of the rhythm and soul marked the blues as an emotive experience time and again. Even if Winehouse distanced herself from the album soon after, it marked a monumental beginning to an agonisingly short career. Winehouse won listeners over with her vocal work, it is more an instrument than an addition, so fluid it is in conjunction with the smattering of piano work and slick blues guitar featured throughout this debut. Frank is a delight, a bitter build of originals, sprinkling a sharp handful of jazz classics in there too, creating this bridge between the old hands and modern contemporaries. 

Repetition carries Know You Now, an intense and often forgotten experience of entertaining intimacies with a person not long for your life. Intense moments like this and Fuck Me Pumps do host the bitterness Winehouse would later discard, but the blues are always close to this – and the neo-soul provocations settle in well when supported by the sweeter originals I Heard Love is Blind. Those infiltrations of saxophone on classic Moody’s Mood for Love is a wonderful treat, as though it were playing in the adjacent room to a world-beating performance from Winehouse. Her adaptation of and to classics is a monumental experience. There is no better feeling late at night than blasting these collections of instrumental wonder.  

(There Is) No Greater Love feels ripped right from the heart of the glorious swinging days of Sinatra and company, the rich instrumental textures, the references to ships passing in the night, there is a classical overhaul here which Winehouse perfects. Skilful consistencies should be no surprise and elevate the muddled parts of October Song and What Is It About Men – those tracks which begin feeling for the bitterness and resentful tones Winehouse denounced after Frank released. Yet they are followed by warm acoustics and the mixing highs of Jimmy Hogarth. Their impact on this one song hears Winehouse connect with the classics further, indebted she may be to those artists she listened to in her early years, she has no trouble clarifying her voice and experiences.  

Is that not the point of adapting to a long-serving genre? Those moments Winehouse renounced as aggrieved lashes at temporary troubles of the time still linger as powerful occasions which still resonate. It is a harsh view of Frank to suggest its brutality and often jagged edges are a disadvantage. If anything it proves Winehouse can make even the harshest and hair-raising of experiences feel comfortable and engaged with a listener who has not experienced it for themselves. Such is the talent of Winehouse as a writer and performer, and paired with the likes of producer Commissioner Gordon and classics from the past on this debut record are delightful. Give the double bill of Help Yourself and Amy Amy Amy a listen, the former an instrumental scorcher while the latter gives those autobiographical spins a powerful change of pace to the usual lust heard in those singers of old, chasing sexual desire despite the moral questions of other voices. Frank is nothing shy of incredible.