Amy Winehouse has been dead for four months, but through previously unreleased material she’s re-entered the airspace of the mortal realm. Like her predecessor Bon Scott, original AC/DC frontman, who died an alcohol-related death back in 1980, the woman behind Back To Black is back in black with its lush music draping itself over your brain like a velvet wrap. It’s both a last encore goodbye and a hello-I’m-back in one. The past tense vanishes on Lioness and  lets Winehouse’s soul burst into  a present she wasn’t destined to inhabit in physical form past July 23, 2011.

Is Lioness: Hidden Treasures (Universal Republic)  Winehouse’s Pearl?  In part, yes. It  reaches back further than Amy’s signature retro 60′s style into the 1950s on “Between The Cheats” and the cover of “Our Day Will Come. “Best Friends, Right?”  humorously and sarcastically captures daily annoyances of couple life: ”I  cant wait to to get away from you/Unsurprisingly you hate me too.” Covers of “Girl From Ipanema” and “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” along with a demo of “Valerie”  are also  found embedded into the fiber of Lioness.

Lucid, lonely, angry and often funny, Winehouse was a gifted writer whose powerful statements combined with her smoky torch of a voice wiped the floor with the thin pipes and insipid lyrics of  many of her overproduced undergifted “contemporaries.” Who could ever forget the raw pain of Back To Black’s “We only said goodbye with words/I died a hundred times?”

Amy Winehouse | “Our Day Will Come” | Unreleased by Radio Meltdown

Amy Winehouse – Like Smoke by Applebee’s Brasil