With the release of her first album, Rockferry, Duffy’s name, face and music were immediately compared to a number of would-be Amy Winehouses for her pegged “neo-soul” sound. The blonde Welsh chanteuse has had to deal with a listening and critical public that won’t acknowledge her music without the framework of a Dusty Springfield and Adele-bound categorization.
On her new album, Endlessly, a super-consciousness of the genre designated to her by critics shows through. Duffy’s attempt to expand herself stylistically ultimately conveys more sonic confusion than intriguing transformation.
The track list on Endlessly doesn’t depart entirely from her initial release, alternating between her familiar dagger-voiced soul (on “Too Hurt To Dance” and “Don’t Forsake Me”) and up-tempo cocktail room compositions that aren’t quite danceable (including “My Boy” and “Well Well Well”). The transitions from song to song only seem to make sense in that their serial, stylistic alternation prevents one from becominge too fed up with a particular musical train of thought.
Even with its inclusion of the single “Well Well Well,” the album’s first half proves somewhat more uncouth and less listenable than the final five tracks. The opening song, “My Boy,” starts the listener out with Duffy’s new direction. Its main fault lies in the overwhelming presence of about a thousand Duffies singing at once, accompanied by what appears to be the repetitious beating of a set of electronic claves.
The softer “Too Hurt to Dance” is followed by “Keeping My Baby,” a song dealing with the serious topic of an unwanted pregnancy, but sounding like the Spice Girls doing Dusty Springfield. Then, “Well Well Well,” during which one imagines the singer wearing an overly sequined dress singing to a crowd of bare-chested middle-aged lushes in an underfunded, late-night Latin cabaret.
The rest of the album seems to take more direct cues from such female legends as Etta James (the title track “Endlessly”) and Nancy Sinatra (the penultimate “Girl”). Duffy provides several fun tracks, but even her nicest, most soulful presentations on Endlessly seem half-hearted when compared with what she gave us on Rockferry.
The main problem is Duffy falls too easily into the conventions that have marked her sound from the start. The ever-present orchestral accompaniment that in certain tracks (see “Girl”) seems out of place, while “Breath Away” sounds terribly formulaic, ending with a half-hearted repetition of the song’s title that could have been wailed a bit more sincerely.
Lyrically, Duffy and fellow songwriter Albert Hammond sometimes sacrifice meaning for the right rhyme, or else provide a trite story that seems to exist merely as an unconvincing vehicle for the singer’s perhaps exaggerated tremolo. The songs generally lack the legitimacy and sincerity of her earlier work.
That said, to her credit the album doesn’t play like a desperate rehashing of her debut. Rather, it is an only partially successful attempt by a great singer to re-imagine her role in the realm of popular music.
As much as she would like to believe otherwise, the blonde Welsh beauty belongs to a tradition. It is a tradition that contains all the names to which she has been compared, and many to which she hasn’t. And, as she has unwittingly shown us, it is a tradition that will not be disregarded; not by her, not by her music and especially not by her often vindictive critics.
