Amy Winehouse: Lioness: Hidden Treasures

Anybody who even passingly followed the tabloids probably guessed that Amy Winehouse wasn’t very productive in the years after her 2006 breakthrough Back To Black, as the same addictions that inspired that album prevented her from making another. Winehouse’s first posthumous release, Lioness: Hidden Treasures, reveals just how little she recorded over her final half-decade. Stretched thin at a mere 45 minutes, and padded with inessential covers and alternate takes, the compilation includes only two songs intended for her unrealized third record. “Between The Cheats” is the more realized of the two, juxtaposing grim glimpses into Winehouse’s rocky marriage against a syrupy doo-wop arrangement. (“I’d take a thousand thumps for my love,” she sings in a tattered purr.) The other, “Like Smoke,” is the faintest sketch of a song, a Winehouse chorus that’s been padded with two long Nas verses clearly recorded after her death. (Among the giveaways: He references the Wall Street protests she never lived to see.)