Amy exploded onto the pop scene this year with her second album, Back to Black, and onto the front pages of the tabloids with her various antics involving her boyfriend/husband and drugs. Her most famous song is Rehab and kickstarts the album here. 'They tried to mke me go to Rahab, I said no no no'. Probably for her own sake she should have gone. Whether going or not going would make any difference on the quality of the music we don't know. We may find out on her next record. Meanwhile we can count ourselves blessed that we have this one. Producer Mark Ronson gets as much credit as Amy for the sound on this album. Its a vintage motown sound, very much in thrall to its influences. When teh songs and tunes are as wonderful and as classic as the ones on this album, regurgitating the Motown feel is no insult. To either party.

In my opinion, the above mentioned song, Rehab, while it certainly makes an instant impact, is teh worst song here. Its repetitive and quite annoying. Luckily, being the first song on the album its easy to skip and allows us to reache the sublime content that follows.

I won't do a song-by-song analysis. But the songs have a mostly lazy swing beat to them. Half cabaret, half slowset. With a plentiful helping of curious sounds and brass backing. ABove all, Amy's classic nasal delivery sings us through her breakup and the pain of love. But the fabulous mucial backing stops things ever getting too morose. We are even treated to some reggae lite on 'Just friends'.

This is simply one of the best albums of 2007.

Sound quality is a mixture of smooth vintage sound and horiffic distortion and overproduced nonsense. In their quest for a vintage sound, all the buttons have been pressed. Many of the percussion is stupidly distorted and the overall sound is highly compressed. Having said that, if you don't listen too closely it sounds just fine. It certainly doesn't shriek. There's an inner picture sleeve with the lyrics and some photos of Amy before she turned into a skeleton. Universal have presented the album on a fairly good heavyweight pressing. Vinyl definitely the way to listen to this album.