Soul of a woman

"Album of the week" - "Jones's final album, released roughly a year after her death, is a throwback in all the right ways: a vintage soul record that thumbs its nose at the 21st century in favour of era-specific methods and concerns. Recorded on eight-track, with frisky instrumentalists called, for example, Fernando "Bugaloo" Velez, and taking up just a lean, mean 36 minutes of your time, it is not really one of those albums in which a feted - or fated - singer mulls their approaching end, but a record replete with drama and succour that wrestles with the messy business of being alive".

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"When Sharon Jones died of pancreatic cancer last year, the world lost its greatest exponent of vintage soul; that she'd first hit her stride in the '00s with the revivalist, detail-obsessed Daptone label, made the accomplishment all the more striking. Recorded over her last two years with longtime sidemen, genre-masters all, Jones meets darkness with hope on this denouement".

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