- Label
- Polydor
- Release date
- 3rd March 2008
- Genre
- Soul
- Buy this album
- Order CD
Talented singer-songwriter toes the line in plundering Sixties soul, and succeeds
Blame Amy Winehouse if you want to, or perhaps Mark Ronson, but there is a real trend for crate-digging at the moment - dusting off all those Stax, Motown and Sue records and using them as the basis for modern pop. Duffy's debut follows this trend, but rather than revisiting the aforementioned soul labels, she sticks instead to a much more mainstream route - taking as influences Bacharach and David, Dusty Springfield, Petula Clark, and even (shudder) Cilla Black. However, it's done with care and attention to the songs she borrows from.
Duffy's voice really is something else - strong and strident when it needs to be, frail and tremulous the next moment. When listening to Rockferry you need to remind yourself that you're listening to modern music by a hotly-tipped young artist - as on Winehouse's amazingly successful Back To Black, certain songs on this album genuinely do sound like they were recorded in the Sixties - and if you find the string-led, heartstring-tugging style of Burt Bacharach a bit too much to take, you won't find much to enjoy here. However, these songs are recorded with passion, and the source materials treated gently rather than stripped and sampled to bits - which leads us to consider that maybe Duffy is worth a lot of the hype she's been getting recently.
More to try: Amy Winehouse: Back To Black Jamie Lidell: Multiply
