We’ve spent the last two days unveiling numbers 50-11 in our top 50 songs of 2011, and now the time has come to unveil what Muso’s Guide’s hefty panel of writers nominated as their top 10 songs released this year. It’s been a pretty diverse selection thus far, and the top end of the chart is no different.

10. Wild Beasts – Reach a Bit Further

9. Ghostpoet – Cash and Carry Me Home

8. PJ Harvey – The Words That Maketh Murder

7. Radiohead – Lotus Flower

6. The Horrors - Endless Blue

5. Metronomy – The Bay

4. Yuck - Get Away

3. Metronomy - The Look

2. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake

1. Lana Del Rey - Video Games

It got so buried in the sea of ‘is she real, OMG her real name isn’t Lana’ sideshow, that it’s easy to forget how great a song Video Games is. True, it might already have become an albatross around her name, bringing about expectations of her debut album that simply can’t be lived up to, but that doesn’t matter for now. Ladies and gentlemen, we proudly present to you Muso’s Guide’s official favourite song of 2011…

Yesterday we posted numbers 50-21 in our Favourite Songs of the year countdown, and we’re edging ever closer to the Top 10. Today sees us revealing the bottom half of our top 20, which can be enjoyed below, in tantalising reverse order of course.

20. Nicola Roberts – Lucky Day

19. Rihanna feat Calvin Harris - We Found Love

18. Little Dragon - Ritual Union

17. Adele - Rolling in the Deep

16. Ghostpoet – Liiines

15. Bombay Bicycle Club – Shuffle

14. Battles ft Matias Aguayo – Ice Cream

13. M83 – Midnight City

12. Wild Beasts – Lion’s Share

11. Johnny Foreigner - (Don’t) Show Us Yr Fangs

Come back tomorrow when we’ll be unveiling the official Muso’s Guide Top 10 songs of 2011.

Last week we unveiled our top 50 albums of the year, but as regular Muso’s readers will know, we get just as excitable about the good old song as we do about full length albums. So with that in mind, over the next three days we’re going to be unveiling which songs our writers have voted their top picks of the year. Enormous thanks are due to Mitchell Sterling who did us proud in fulfilling his annual chore sifted through the emails from the Muso’s Guide staff, compiling them into something resembling a logical order.

Without further ado, here are picks 50 through to 21. Check back tomorrow for 20-11 and then on Thursday we’ll be unveiling our top 10 songs of the year.

50. The Leisure Society – You Could Keep Me Talking
49. St. Vincent – Cruel
48. Friendly Fires – Hawaiian Air
47. Hannah Peel – The Almond Tree
46. Jamie xx – Far Nearer
45. James Blake – The Wilhelm Scream
44. Radiohead – Codex
43. Jessie Ware – Strangest Feeling
42. Drake – Headlines
41. The Horrors – Still Life
40. Slow Club – Where I’m Waking
39. Telekinesis – Please Ask For Help
38. Arctic Monkeys – The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala
37. The National – Think You Can Wait
36. Nicki Minaj – Super Bass
35. Bjork – Crystalline
34. Death Cab For Cutie – You Are a Tourist
33. Coldplay – Paradise
32. SBTRKT – Wildfire
31. Junior Boys – Banana Ripple
30. British Sea Power – Who’s in Control
29. Beyonce – Run the World (Girls)
28. The National – Exile Vilify
27. Active Child ft. How to Dress Well – Playing House
26. Azealia Banks – 212
25. Beyonce – Countdown
24. Lady Gaga – Marry the Night
23. Bon Iver – Holocene
22. Girls – Honey Bunny
21. The Saturdays – All Fired Up

Numbers 20-11 will be up tomorrow, and the top 10 will be posted on Thursday.

Los Campesinos! - Hello Sadness

By Paul Brown

We need to get one thing straight from the off. While Los Campesinos!’ evolution from those energetic kids who first charmed us with songs about cherryade and Amelia Fletcher, into Serious Indie Musicians has been divisive, I’m firmly in favour of it. It’s not a coincidence that their songs have become stronger as they’ve become more ambitious musicians, and while it’s been sad to see them waving goodbye to old friends along the way, the cold hard truth of the matter is that they’re a better band now than they were four years ago. Besides, as fun as Hold On Now Youngster was, and still remains, four doses of the same scratchy lo-fi boisterousness would have got less and less enjoyable, and the band wouldn’t have held people’s attention for as long as they have.

And so, following on from the sprawling, ambitious triumph of Romance is Boring, Hello Sadness comes to us heavily burdened with the tag of ‘break-up album’, something which actually forced a full rewrite of the album’s lyrics just before it came to recording. As you should probably expect by now, Gareth tackles the subject with characteristic candour, rarely sparing himself the whip, and this results in some pretty intense moments where on occasion you feel you perhaps shouldn’t really be peering so closely into the depths of his despair. You could pick near enough any lyrical snippet from the album as representative of his blood-letting, but it’s closing track ‘Light Leaves Dark Sees part II’ which cuts deepest: ‘I enter the abbatoir to see my insides hanging there / but they request that I leave ‘cos my sad eyes are too much to bear’, this coming shortly before he’s pining for ‘the sound of your pissing through the thin walls’.

Still, though, for all the heartache which Hello Sadness thrusts so nakedly in your face, it’s never really an overbearing or heavy listen. The aforementioned ‘Light Leaves’ and ‘Hate For the Island’ are exceptions in their musical backing echoing the downbeat tone of their lyrics. Much of the rest of the record bounces along with a zip uncharacteristic of its subject matter, like ‘Life is a Long Time’ where the pay-off of ‘It starts pretty rough and ends up even worse’ is underpinned by an exuberant little melody which thoroughly contradicts the misery. Similarly, ‘Songs About Your Girlfriend’, a defiant paean to, er, writing songs about someone else’s girlfriend is positively perky, bouncing along like Los Campesinos! of old.

Perhaps inevitably, the album is focused almost exclusively around the subject of broken relationships, with only ‘Three Lions (Every Defeat a Divorce)’ really deviating from the context, and even then it’s only a slight sidestep into heartbreak caused by football. What this means though, is that Hello Sadness feels much more focused than Romance is Boring, and in ‘The Black Bird, The Dark Slope’ and ‘To Tundra’ it has two songs fit to stand up against the two spine-tingling moments which lit up Romance is Boring, ‘The Sea is a Good Place to Think about the Future’ and ‘Who Fell Asleep In’. We’re getting to the time of year when thoughts turn to best of the year lists, and while Hello Sadness comes late to the party, disadvantaged by eleven months of great records being embedded into our collective consciousness, it’s as good as anything else to have been released this year. At the very least, it’s Los Campesinos!’ best album to date.

Manic Street Preachers - National Treasures: The Complete Singles Collection

By Paul Brown

‘Never ever wanted to be with you. The only thing you gave me was the boredom I suffocated in’

… and with a scratchy, Clash rip-off of a riff, so begins twenty ridiculous, contradictory and constantly engrossing years of Manic Street Preachers as a singles band. All the, ahem, kicks they’ve given us down the years mean they’ve earned the unquestionable right to make a lie of all that schtick about making one album and splitting up, so boringly thrown back in their faces for so many years. The long and short of it is that the release of National Treasures represents far and away the most interesting, heart-warming singles collection that the Christmas cash-in market will throw at us this year.

The decision to compile their thirty-eight singles in chronological order feels right, a much more honest way to depict their history than 2002’s botched greatest hits compilation Forever Delayed, and therefore much more in keeping with the band’s character. Naturally, this makes for a slightly disorienting ride all told, because as anyone with even a passing interest in Manic Street Preachers knows, their music has moved in some pretty confusing directions over the years. However, there’s unlikely to be a better chance for lovers, haters and the indifferent alike to put the Manics body of work into context, or for newcomers too daunted by ten albums of back catalogue to gain a warts-and-all introduction to a band whose influence on popular musical culture is still, somehow, overlooked far too much.

Disc one covers the period from the band’s inception to their fourth album, Everything Must Go, (ie the Richey years and the immediate honeymoon/mourning period which followed them), and as such the tracklist contains some of the most jaw-droppingly intelligent music of the 1990s. To this day, no band has improved on ‘You Love Us’ as a ‘fuck you’ to the industry, and hundreds must have tried. And, of course, there’s the band’s greatest success, ‘A Design For Life’, an undulating, swooning pop song about the working class condition, dripping in bracing sarcasm, and written with crystalline clarity in a cloud of grief following Richey’s disappearance, it still sounds special in 2011. Really, there’s not a mis-step to be found on the first half of the collection, ‘Faster’ is still one of the band’s most exhilarating moments, ‘Motorcycle Emptiness’ is a wonder, Christ, even the sickly slickness of Gold Against the Soul bred some killer singles in the shape of ‘La Tristesse Durera’ and ‘From Despair to Where’.

The second half of the saga compiled on National Treasures, however, is an altogether different tale. Where disc one opened with a defiant, breathless spew of acid, part two commences with the tired sigh of “The future teaches you to be alone, the present to be afraid and cold”, ushering in the second age of the Manics, when the summery goodwill of Everything Must Go gave way to the autumnnal ponderousness of This is My Truth Tell Me Yours. And still, ‘If You Tolerate This Your Children Will be Next’, a maudlin song about the Spanish Civil War became a bloody number one single! See what I mean about contradictory? It’s a bit of a bumpy ride from then on, reflecting the identity crisis the band suffered in the noughties, and which sees the old-Manics visceral thrill of ‘The Masses Against the Classes’ sat next to the still baffling ‘So Why So Sad’.

That said, though, while the Manics might have spent much of the last decade wrestling with what they’re supposed to sound like, they’ve still produced some utter gems. The band might have all but disowned Lifeblood, but ‘The Love of Richard Nixon’ and ‘Empty Souls’ are still brilliant pop singles.  Sure, they’re a world away from ‘traditional’ Manic Street Preachers, but really, I’d argue that for a band synonymous with leopard print and eyeliner, to make a coffee-table pop record is just as brave as carving slogans into their arms.

Their latter days seem to have found them settling back into their own skins and revisiting the heady guitar and strings template of their commercial heyday, and so National Treasures comes to an invigorating conclusion with a run of gorgeous big pop songs. It feels like a fittingly grandiose way to draw a line under a compilation which provides the most comprehensive overview yet of one of the most important and most human bands we’ll ever have in this country. As usual, the Manics were taking the piss out of themselves with the title of National Treasures, but the cap definitely fits.

by Paul Brown

As someone who considers himself to be a major lover of the North East’s musical happenings, it is quite simply a travesty that I haven’t yet made it to either of the previous installments of Split Festival, so I’m pleased to finally rectify that this year, even if I’m only able to make it to the festival’s first day. Set in the lovely surroundings of Ashbrooke Sports Club in a pretty leafy part of Sunderland, the line-up of the festival is a gratifying blend of local and bigger name talent, and acts as a lesson to the organisers of the farcically aborted Ignition fest in Newcastle who attempted something similar recently.

The first band we catch are the increasingly impressive Vinyl Jacket. The Wylam fivesome are part of an undercurrent of brilliant North East guitar pop bands whose reputations seem to be gradually creeping further and further out of the boundaries of the region into national consciousness, and today is a pretty stark indication of exactly why that’s happening. They’re razor sharp, a shiny little bundle of perky pop hooks and taut rhythms, and even now, almost a week later, I STILL can’t shift ‘Got the Badge’ out of my head. I end up so engrossed in Vinyl Jacket, that I end up only catching the tail end of The Lake Poets’ set, which is a shame, because the full band set-up (apparently a permanent addition now) nicely fleshes out Martin Longstaff’s songs, augmenting them rather than crowding the loveliness of his voice.

The next band we catch in the main tent prove to be one of the most pleasant surprises of the day. For a little while, I’ve been dimly aware of the hype which is beginning to engulf Spector, which naturally always makes one wary, but today’s performance vindicates it completely. They rise to the awkward task of filling the tent with their grandiose pop, so much so that you can look past the ridiculously massive coats. Their attire, however, pales in comparison with the bird masks worn by the wonderful, insane blur of squawking japery that is B>E>A>K. Their set is an irresistible tide of instrumental joy, which sweeps everyone in the tent in its wake. It’s impossible to imagine how anyone could be so soulless as to not enjoy this, because from the members spilling out into the crowd, to the confetti cannons at the end, it’s just wonderful unfettered fun.

All of which makes Beth Jeans Houghton‘s job in following on from B>E>A>K a pretty thankless one, but she answers the challenge elegantly enough, with a near flawless collection of gracefully poised guitar pop. The ice-cool veneer cracks only briefly during the shouty ‘fuck off’-littered breakdown towards the end of the set. There’s a slightly awkward clash following Beth’s set between Withered Hand and Split Veterans Dutch Uncles, and we opt for the former, a decision which appears to put us in the minority because the tent is far more quiet than Withered Hand deserves. Mainstay Dan Wilson is joined by a backing group comprising the wonderful O’Messy Life and a couple of other pals, and it’s a brilliant fit for his mordant songcraft. By the end, the collective are fighting it out with B>E>A>K for best band of the day.

We manage to catch the final flourishes of Dutch Uncles’ set, and, like apparently everyone else today, they’re in fine form, with their squirming, agitated pop genius leaving me confused as to how this band aren’t absolutely massive. All this brilliance leaves us a bit peckish, so we opt for a little breather and a trip to the food tent which is as well put together as the rest of the festival, and far more reasonable in price than you’d normally expect from festival food.

By this time, the day is drawing in a bit, and it’s the pefect setting for the acoustic songcraft of Beth Orton. In truth, as someone who is unfamilar with the vast majority of her recorded output, her set washes over me a little, but she’s extremely likeable, and these are clearly good songs. It’s also pretty pleasing when she tells everyone to shut up for her last song, although that chatty clown stood next to me has got some bloody cheek to cheer when she does this.

By the time Mystery Jets are on in the main tent, as you might expect after a day of beer and brilliant bands, people seem to be coming apart a bit, and I don’t know if it has an effect on the band, because they aren’t really firing on all cylinders at first. That intangible pop magic that has brought all three of their records so sharply to life isn’t there straight away, but they grow into the set (which leans heavily on the last two records, ignoring Making Dens completely), so by the time they finish with the gorgeous ‘Flakes’, we’re eating out of their hands.

So then, Split’s opening day is an absolute triumph, which makes it all the more distressing that we’re not able to stick around for the Sunday too, but hey, we’ve made enough wonderful memories to sustain us until next year.

by Paul Brown

We’ve all probably seen the distressing scenes of the droughts in East Africa recently, and it’s difficult to shake an over-riding feeling of helplessness. Recently, though, a collection of musicians in the North East of England have come together in an effort to provide some kind of help to those affected, by providing a series of exclusive songs to a stunning new compilation called North East by East Africa.

The compilation features a tantalising mix of big name North East artists including The Futureheads, Field Music, and Paul Smith, as well as a number of the region’s brilliant up and coming bands like Let’s Buy Happiness, Lanterns on the Lake, O’Messy Life, Young Liar and The Lake Poets. Each provide a song which is not available anywhere else, and the result is a record which showcases the quality of the musicians in the North East, as well as providing much-needed aid.

The album can be purchased on limited edition CD from http://nexea.bigcartel.com and download from http://nexea.bandcamp.com.

By Paul Brown

For a few months now, I’ve been excitedly looking forward to Slow Down, the debut album from Hyde and Beast, the North East super-group of sorts, comprised of Futureheads drummer Dave Hyde and former Golden Virgins member Neil Bassett. The record came out on August 15th, and as Dave tells us, has been a long time in the making: “We’ve known each other for twelve years or something, and we’ve been pretty good friends for a while, but a few years ago I was really busy with the Futureheads and kind of lost contact. We were doing our own things for ages, and then a few years ago, he was running a studio in Sunderland, and it seemed pretty perfect ‘cos I just lived round the corner from it!, We never intended to do an album at all, it was just that I’d had these few songs for years and years that I just wanted to get down.”

The songs, then, are almost entirely Dave’s, and as such reflect his own musical loves, and would appear to mark a bit of a departure from the furrow he ploughs with The Futureheads: “I don’t really listen to lots of modern music to be honest. Just old music a lot of the time… There’s quite a seventies format to the way the album sounds, it is quite old-sounding. I’d like to think it does have a little bit of something else to offer, but I understand that a lot of my influences are old, so it’s gonna probably sound like that, yeah. It’s great though, me and Neil are really pleased with what we’ve done”.

The band have started to build up some pretty positive press around their live shows of late too, and one particular gig in Manchester recently garnered a pretty sizeable chunk of attention, a large part of which was because of the unlikely support act they managed to rustle up in the shape of Lee Mavers: “It was very weird! I enjoyed his set, his guitar sounded amazing. He’s quite a legend, so it was a bit nerve-wracking to go on after him. It didn’t make sense to me at all, but it was good.” The band have announced some more shows in support of Slow Down, one of which is a slot at Sunderland’s Split Festival, an event running on September 17th and 18th which is pretty close to Dave’s heart: “Aye, it’s a festival we (The Futureheads) are running, we’re working on the day. It’s our festival. It’s our third year, we’re really excited. We all have different jobs, and mine is basically hospitality. Ross is pretty much the guy for the bands. He books all the bands. I’ve got it easy, like!”

With a line-up including the likes of Mystery Jets, The Charlatans and Frankie and the Heartstrings, Dave’s hoping to get a little time off his work duties to see some of Ross’ choices, “I’d like to see a bit of B>E>A>K, The Drums, Leatherface, Charlatans, there’s a few. It’s a pretty great line-up”. There’s a bit more to Split than just the bands though, especially for a family man like Dave: “We’ve got an acoustic tent and a kind of music playgroup, every hour there’ll be a fifteen minute lesson for kids, because there’ll be a lot of them about at the festival, so they can learn a few things whilst they’re there.”

It seems a bit early to be talking about the next record when the debut’s not even out yet, but it seems like Dave and Neil aren’t going to hang about in following up Slow Down: “We’re dying to make another one. We’ve got a whole new album on Neil’s phone, like a lot of these little ideas. We plan to put another one out relatively quickly but it’s just finding the time to do it.” Of course, there’s the little matter of the day-job to contend with too: “There’s loads of Futureheads stuff going on, we’ve got an a capella album coming out in the Autumn, so I’m going to be really busy”. He’s not kidding…

by Paul Brown

Given the events of the past week, it’d be easy to be a bit flippant and infuse this weeks singles column with some kind of glib riot theme, make some rubbish Kaiser Chiefs joke, or even drop in some shit crack about Gazza and a fishing rod (we’ve all got one of those wankers in our Facebook feeds, right?) However, that’d be pretty disrespectful to those who lost businesses, homes, hope, and in the case of one horrible incident, lives, so it’s probably best we just focus our attentions on the power of music to unite us, to lift us, and infuriate us. After all, few things offer a better escape than a good single. Onwards, then.

Arctic Monkeys
‘The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala’

Suck it and See was unfairly called a ‘return to form’ by far too many people, when it was completely inaccurate to suggest that Arctic Monkeys ever lost their form in the first place. Either way, it’s a cracking album, and ‘The Hellcat Spangled Shalalala’ is one of its highlights. It’s got a gorgeous sleepy air to it, and at the same time it’s the band’s biggest nod yet to proper big old pop music. You might struggle to get your hands on a physical copy due to some shithouses in Enfield, but God, if you don’t own this song in one form or another, then you really must rectify that.

The Union Choir
‘Eleanor’

‘Eleanor”s a seriously lush piece of work from North-East nine-piece The Union Choir. The song is dominated by Jon Melvin’s vocal, simultaneously gruff and reassuring, but underneath it lies an absolutely beautifully arranged chamber pop instrumental. Throw in the equally lovely b-sides (one of which, ‘Rapture’, is arguably even better than the lead song), and you’ve got a good old-fashioned proper single, which stands alone as an absolutely brilliant release. All very impressive for a debut, and it’s pushing Arctic Monkeys pretty hard to be the week’s best single.

Sea of Bees
‘Gnomes’

‘Gnomes’ is as good as anything on Sea of Bees’ album Songs For the Ravens, but you really need to see Sea of Bees live to get the full picture of what she’s about. On stage, her extraordinary voice and endearing awkwardness make for a pretty special gigging experience, but on record there’s a danger that it can all be just a touch overwhelming. That notwithstanding, ‘Gnomes’ is a nice jaunty little strum-along, catchier than you realise at first, but it’s all rendered a bit disorienting by that eye-fuck of a video.

The Feeling
‘A Hundred Sinners (Come and Get It)’

Oh wow. I’d genuinely forgotten this band ever existed. Apparently this comes from their third album, although I have no recollection of the second appearing. This is basically like all three of the other Feeling songs that I’ve heard in my life, only a bit more half-arsed. It’s notable (!) exclusively for the singer doing what I can only assume is a Sting impression on the chorus. There really is absolutely no reason whatsoever for these people to still be making records together. In fact, I’m not even going to bother posting a video, partly because YouTube doesn’t appear to have one, and partly because even if it did, you wouldn’t want to watch it.

Wonderland
‘Nothing Moves Me Any More’

Prior to hearing this song just now, I had no idea who Wonderland were. Man, they were halcyon days. This is absolutely laughable drippy nonsense. You see, I’ve always thought Girls Aloud were A Good Thing, but if this kind of lazy, trite bilge is a direct result of their success, then maybe I need to reconsider my relationship with Cole and her pals. I’ll still stick the video for this one up, purely because you might need a laugh of a Monday morning.

Yann Tiersen
‘Monuments’

Okay, I was keen to finish on a positive note, so I’m grateful to Yann Tiersen for enabling me to do so. ‘Monuments’ is a stunning piece of work, minimally constructed, but enormously affecting nevertheless. In fact, right at the last minute, it’s turned The Union Choir and Arctic Monkeys’ two way scrap for single of the week into a triple-header. The gorgeously weird animated video might just swing it Tiersen’s way though.

I own neither Frank nor Back to Black. I’ve never had any particularly strong feelings about Amy Winehouse as a musician, save for a vague appreciation of that voice and the clutch of singles which cemented her megastardom. Yet, since the first uneasy pricklings of the rumours of her death began to gather momentum early this evening, it’s dominated my thoughts almost exclusively.

For someone who was born in the same year as Amy, to see her name suffixed with (1983-2011) is unpleasantly sobering. But I think what has made me most uncomfortable about this sad and sordid tale is the way the final chapter of her life has unfolded so rapidly and so nakedly in front of the eyes of the entire world. For starters, if the story that her father Mitch was on a plane when the event he has dreaded for years finally happened, then it’s pretty likely that most of the world knew his twenty-seven year old daughter was dead before he did. That isn’t right.

But then I guess that’s the curse of the age we live in. As much as the internet has changed our lives in countless wonderful ways, the Twitter age in particular has brought about an unhealthy stampede for a share of voice, and perpetuated people’s unsavoury desire to be first on the scene. Predictably, Twitter went ape-shit this evening with millions of people shouting over each other, increasingly desperate for their opinions to be heard. It all stems from the ever-more embarrassing 24 hour news channels, of course, who taught us in the first place to demand gratification NOW NOW NOW, and were falling over themselves to spew their ill-considered coverage out as rapidly as they could manage within an hour of Amy’s death. For Christ’s sake, at one point, Sky News proudly proclaimed that they were able to confirm that she had died in a house rather than a flat as though it were the most vital of pieces of information.

And then, of course, once the main ‘facts’ were out there, they switched to ‘LIVE COVERAGE’ of a load of ghouls standing around by a cordon in Camden. While this was happening, you could practically hear the desperate researchers scrabbling around behind the scenes to find any old moron who would answer their phone and was willing to deliver ham-fisted analysis about where Amy would fit in the history books as well as the compulsory irrelevant comparisons with other musicians who happened to die at the age of 27.

Throughout all this, I imagine that Facebook feeds across the world exploded in similar fashion to mine, with two or three channels of opinion eventually forming. Firstly, we got the standard ‘RIP Amy’ types. Then, dissenting ‘It was her own fault, you shouldn’t feel sorry for her’ viewpoints started to appear. Fine. I disagree wholeheartedly with such a cold-hearted assessment, but, hey, I accept that it’s a matter of opinion. What was most unpleasant though was the tranche of people who saw fit to drag the horrific recent events in Norway into things, creating a deranged kind of competition where some fucked-up morbid hierarchy dictates that it is somehow wrong to find the death of a twenty-seven year old girl sad, simply because another terrible and more deserving tragedy has used up our apparently finite supplies of human feeling.

Eventually, the clamour will fade, just as it did with Michael Jackson, but the future of Winehouse’s legacy is just as depressingly predictable as Jacko’s was. Right now, I imagine someone is desperately cobbling together a book about her life and death in an attempt to get a story on the shelves while the memory is still sufficiently vivid for people to be curious enough to put their hands in their pockets. And, if they haven’t started already, plans for the deluxe editions of Frank and Back to Black will surely be formed soon, as well as a patched-together version of her third album, and once those supplies are exhausted, there’s bound to be plenty of live recordings to put out. Still, as distasteful as some may find the inevitable pimping of the Winehouse back catalogue, at the very least it focuses on her music, rather than the manner of her death. And, of course, the internet will thankfully return to normal before too long, at least until the next unexpected major death, when the whole sorry cycle will start all over again.