Going through the motions she ain’t, she’s going somewhere!

Release Date : 4th July 2025

Label : New Retro Records

Format : CD / digital

a good set of soul-jazz

Dangerous things, the names we sometimes choose for our outpourings, and one would hope that Ms. Levin wil not have this particular choice bounce back and bite her on the, well, you know. But I am sure not everyone is as scatological as I, so let me start with a statement that this is certainly not anything at all like that. In fact, this is good a short set of songs in a soul-jazz format I have heard in a while.

Of course, the spectre of one certain Amy Winehouse always looms large in the background of such endeavours, the yardstick, at least in this country, of the seriousness taken. And I can hear hints of Winehouse in Levin’s cadence, which is neither a bad thing nor unexpected. To find anyone these days who doesn’t sound like another is unusual, which may be less down to any lack of individual presence, more the fact that there are only so many variations. And the late Amy also sounded like some of those ahead of her, Sarah Vaughan for one, had Vaughan been born in Enfield.

big in birkenhead

Levin may still be a young woman, newly moved down to London, but it is fair to say she is world famous in Birkenhead, having played in every club and pub in the North West. Indeed, listeners to Jazz FM too rate her highly, with a string of A-listed singles on that station, as well as being featured on 6 Music and Radio 2. I may have never heard or of her, but she has sold out the Albert Hall, London’s one at that, rather than the Mancs namesake. OK, it was the Elgar Room there, but it is still a notch to have on your bedpost. With a knack of putting songs together almost to demand, influences cited are Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and the train.

The train, not the Drops Of Jupiter (Tell Me) hitmakers from San Fran, The Train, she finding the rhythm of the tracks conducive to connecting words with nascent melodies. Sugar from this set, also the lead single, was written to rote, with the realisation she needed something a little more upbeat. The train was clearly rocking along that day!

A pleasing bob

The set opens with the pleasing bob of Call Me Names. Electric piano and stand up bass skip along to finger clicking percussion, before some strings, possibly synth, slide in. This is maybe the most Amy track here, if a more commercial version, with any scouse surgically excised from her diction. But it is a catchy one, right enough, And is that the sound of steel pans, or a sound supposed to be, slotting in beside the piano, a neat touch I endorse.

A guitar figure hypnotically repeats to then usher in the aforementioned Sugar and it is smooth sophisti-pop, if possibly with too much polish and too many notes to be a hit, however much it deserves to be. Those steel pan sounds are even more pronounced.

Woozy smokescreen

Excuse is a slower confessional, on a bed of shimmery and echoey keyboards. It is a wonderful woozy smoke-screen of a song. A waft of trip hop seeps into the chorus and I’m sold. Her voice is very much more her own on this one, and it is all the better for that. Felt brings in some fumes of Sade, as it starts, that singer another yardstick for any singer of torch, with the chorus then chock full of retro soul tropes, of grainy black and white film clips and sashaying girlie trios. More Ready Steady Go than Top of the Pops and very Mari Wilson, in fact, as well, the 80’s singer who tapped into a similar vein.

A supper club Me And Mrs Jones ambience informs the final track, Pass You By, if a superior and expensive version, none of your cruise ship deck bar nonsense. A song she wrote in the memory of her mother, someone who clearly informed her daughter’s taste in music, with a love of Whitney, Luther Vandross and, yes, Sade. Her dad? Well, he was a bit more Floyd and Stone Roses, the influences, if there, a little better disguised. The song is a strong contender for the highlight here, and, to keep it to last seems a sound move, cementing her overall value, casting the songs ahead of it into prisms of perspective.

Late night lounge simmer

But who said final track, for, should you purchase the hard copy, there are three further, which I couldn’t let pass you by, one further of her own and two cover versions. The one of her own is Dream Girl, a classic late night lounge simmer, with clipped Barney Kessel style guitar, vibes and sultry strings. Uncertain why it was “left off” the digital version, my suspicion being it is too overtly the vocal jazz of my parents and her grandparent’s generation. Be that it may, it is wonderful, swoonsome, even.

That same mood is expanded upon for She’s A Lady, which even adds that fingerclicking percussion, back again, to a song Tom Jones honked out in 1971. He did it nothing like this, mind, it smacking here of a long slinky black number rather than too tight black pants. It is also rather gorgeous, but the corn is dialled up just a little to far for final final song, Are You Gonna Be My Girl. Until, of course, you realise and remember the original, by Oz rockers Jet, some prime cock-rock from 1983. In which case you realise quite what a good transformation has here been wreaked. Plus, which is clever, these last three songs have totally had you forget all the earlier Winehouse remarks, so another reason to get the full set.

Play that again

A word for the producer, Jon Withnall, is needed, as however good these songs are, and they are, it is his arrangements that lift them from “that’s nice” to “can you play that again, please”*. I’m guessing he will have also had at least a hand in the two so entirely revisioned cover versions.

*And from then to “play that again, louder, and shut up whilst it’s on”.

Here’s Sugar, possibly my favourite:

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