New Winehouse Song: Comeback or Slurring Mess?

Amy Winehouse is back … maybe. She’s in the news—for a new single, not a crazy booze-fueled escapade—but critics are split on her cover of Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party,” produced by Mark Ronson:

• “It’s tough not to get carried away,” writes Amos Barshad in New York. “Winehouse lets it fly … turning in a dialed-in, muscular vocal performance that moves effortlessly from louche to anguished—and sounds not even a tiny bit horribly addicted to drugs while doing so.”
• Based on the single, “our expectations for Amy's upcoming album of ‘jukebox stuff’ have been raised,” writes Margaret Hartmann on Jezebel.

• “The RonHouse pairing proves as Spector-esquely fruitful as ever,” writes Leah Greenblatt for Entertainment Weekly. “Though frankly, whether the reasons are stylistic or substance-related, Amy’s penchant for slurring her vocals yields something closer to ‘Ish My Parrry.’”
• The results of the Winehouse-Ronson reunion “are, ahem, ‘interesting,’” writes Tim Jonze in the Guardian. “It's not—how can we say this?—the most coherent vocal ever laid to tape, although if there's ever a song where you can let it all go a bit runny-mascara-and-10-Bacardi-Breezers then this is it.”

Click here for one more dissenting opinion of the “slurry” and “kind of sad” song. (More Amy Winehouse stories.)