Back To Black

Looks can be deceiving. Just ask Josh Groban — weedy body, huge voice. Or Amy Winehouse.

With her drink-fuelled personal life wrestling tabloid inches away from even Pete Doherty, she's still managed to stay sober long enough to write and record an entire album that's not half bad.

And despite her appearance — skinny, tarty little white girl — she sings with all the soul of a 1950s Deep South gospel choir. Her vocals may not be as technically impressive as Joss Stone's but they have a real character that her rival lacks.

With all the imperfections in Winehouse's deep timbre she sounds like the real deal, as if she knows what it's like to be lying in the gutter with her heart ripped out — literally of course.

Not just anyone can so coolly pull off a line like "What king of fuckery is this".

And when she refuses to go to rehab in the breakout song of the same name, you just know the gutsy 23-year-old has had this argument before. It probably didn’t sound so good though — dressed up with short stabs of brass, strings and drumming imported directly from 1960s Motown.

Unlike Christina Aguilera's recent exploration of vintage sounds, Winehouse and her collaborators — producers Mark Ronson and someone going by salaamremi.com — have done their best to recreate the atmosphere of the period. Modern touches are kept to a minimum on the 10 straight-to-the-point songs that, like those of the era they emulate, clock in at a total of just over 30 minutes.

It's irrelevant whether this was done to leave more time for drinking — the brevity works. Anything longer and the consistent mood that's briefly infiltrated by the dub elements of 'Just Friends' would simply have become too much. Too monotonous. Too boring.

And that's one thing the Brit Award-winning Winehouse is not.