On-The-Fly CD Review: FRANK by Amy Winehouse
British soul chaunteuse Amy Winehouse's Back to Black was pretty near the greatest thing I heard last year, so when her 2003 debut disc Frank received a proper US issue recently, I snatched it up in an eighth-of-a-heartbeat. Frank really does feel like a dry run for its stone-masterpiece follow-up, but it proves that Back to Black was no fluke. Right out of the gate, Winehouse's acerbic lyrical stance--think Peggy Lee 's and Elvis Costello's love child learning salty sexual bluntness from Peaches --had already emerged fully-formed. Whether she's dissecting a hard-partying club girl with Dorothy Parker straightrazor swipes on the hilarious "F*** Me Pumps" or kittenishly rationalizing a one-night stand to her cuckolded lover on "I Heard Love is Blind," Winehouse's observational and reflective gifts as a writer are staggering. Unbelieveably, she'd penned these intelligent and witty lyrics before she was old enough to even legally buy a ...