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J. Edward Keyes on Shuffle


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Published: Mar 20, 2007

Amy Winehouse, this week's unrepentant celebrity drunk, arrives on U.S. shores after several solid weeks of giddy headlines and Internet leaks. Winehouse follows Lily Allen as another British artist playing deliberate games with musical genres. But where Allen's chief modus is pastiche, Winehouse is more interested in homage. Back to Black is built to sound old and, mostly, it does. There's a grainy needle-on-vinyl sound to the compositions, and the foggy horn blasts and itchy guitars sound, impishly and intentionally, lifted from the Stax archives.

Amy Winehouse

Back to Black

(Republic)

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists

Living With the Living

(Touch & Go)

Winehouse has a marvelous voice and near-perfect tone, but she falls curiously short when it comes to interpretation. There are no virtuoso moments on Black — everything is delivered in the same scratchy alto swoop, with the breakup ballad "Love Is a Losing Game" sounding no more pained or purposeful than Winehouse's now-famous indulgence ode "Rehab." While Winehouse is not nearly as infuriating as neo-soul oversingers like Joss Stone, there's a strange sense of detachment to Black that prevents it from truly taking root.

Her recent showcase at the South By Southwest music conference only amplified this problem. Backed by the watertight New York R&B combo the Dap-Kings, Winehouse seemed curiously low-wattage. She dipped and shimmied and sipped her rum and Coke, but her heart seemed miles away — someplace safer, maybe, but not necessarily better.

Ted Leo, on the other hand, is steadfastly about the here and now. His blistering fifth record, Living with the Living, is all bombs and guns and ill-fated protests, another furious salvo from New Jersey designed to shake the sleeping. In anyone else's hands this kind of naked sloganeering would seem ham-handed, but Leo is an astonishing songwriter, capable of wrapping Chomsky-esque sentiment in immensely memorable tunes.

Some of Leo's past work has aped his influences rather nakedly, but Living is entirely his own. Galloping out of the gate with the riotous "The Sons of Cain," Leo finds the spot where discontent meets optimism and revels in it over and again. His songs are built around taut guitar riffs and ricocheting percussion, and they have a kind of joyous elastic bounce that's unrelenting and irresistible.

Ted Leo plays the The TLA on Wednesday.