Review: Adele’s 25 Is the Confessional Blockbuster You Wanted It to Be
YZfashionbridal Inc- Nov 20, 2015
- 5 min read
ook at the music industry. Isn’t it cute how perky and expectant it is this morning, like a little kid on Christmas or your cat when it hears you opening a can of tuna? That’s becauseAdele is releasing a new album today, and Adele, unlike most contemporary performers, sells records—CDs, even. Her last album, 21, has moved more than 11 million copies in the U.S. since its release, in 2011, and 31 million worldwide. Those are old-school, Michael Jackson–y numbers (well, Bad or Dangerous numbers)—more old-school than Adele’s often retro-sounding songs. They’re the kinds of sales figures record executives probably thought they’d never see again in an era when moving tens of thousands of units can get you to No. 1. The timing of 25, as the new record is titled, is even more fortuitous given that the industry’s previous savior, Taylor Swift’s 1989, has begun its inevitable commercial descent, plummeting to a scrawny 14 on this week’s Billboard 200 after selling 5.3 million copies in the U.S. alone since its release a little more than a year ago.
It probably says something that this decade’s three genuinely transcendent pop stars, Adele, Swift andBeyoncé, are all women and that two of them are using their album titles to tell us how old they are. (Sort of: Swift was born in 1989 but Adele is actually 27.) At any rate, that’s a subject for another essay. You want to know if 25 is any good. It is. It is very good, maybe even excellent, maybe even better than 21. It’s hard for me to make a definitive proclamation, since I’ve only had 36 hours with the album; music needs time to reveal its depths, or lack thereof. But the new record’s mix of classic R&B, timelessly roof-rattling ballads, and contemporary pop is very much in keeping with its predecessor: familiar yet not toofamiliar, and instantly gripping because it’s all sung by that voice.
That voice. The throat surgery she underwent following a vocal hemorrhage in 2011 has done nothing to diminish either its character or power; brassy yet husky, smoky yet clarion, she still sounds like the result of a genetic experiment fusing Amy Winehouse’s vocal chords with Céline Dion’s lungs, or even Tom Jones’s. It’s a voice that should sing every James Bond theme, not just the one from Skyfall for which she won an Oscar, in 2013. Her writing skills haven’t dimmed either. With the help of serial collaborators, some returning, some new, she has conceived another batch of real songs, with real melodies, not just strings of hooks and naked, genuine-seeming emotions. Could that be a bigger key to her success than even that voice? As a singer she is often compared to Aretha Franklin, not altogether ludicrously, and for her own part the First Lady of Soul paid the compliment forward, or backward, by including “Rolling in the Deep” alongside the likes of “At Last,” “I Will Survive,” and “People” on her 2014 album Aretha Franklin Sings the Great Diva Classics.
21—Adele’s second album following 2008’s 19—was an often angry breakup album, as you might remember from the bitingly sung chorus of “Rolling in the Deep”: “We could have had it awwwlllllllllll.” At present, Adele is in a relationship with a London businessman, the father of her three-year-old son, but she doesn’t sound much happier on 25 than she did on 21, which is too bad for her but probably good for fans. You could call the new record a pre-breakup album, its songs alternating between poking a stick at old boyfriends (never a good sign) and growing frustrated with whatever it is she’s got going on now. “Hello,” which opens the album, is about ex-lovers and unfinished business. It starts out sounding like something off Lana Del Rey’s recent album, Honeymoon, with Adele’s voice taking on a flat affect as she sings over vaguely sinister keyboard chords:
Hello, it’s me. I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet / To go over everything / They say time is supposed to heal ya / But I haven’t done much healing
Then comes the chorus: big, booming, throbbing with emotion, and instantly addictive—it’s not Lana Del Rey! It’s Adele! There’s even a tolling bell for extra oomph! But any resolution is strictly musical:
Hello from the other side I must have called a thousand times To tell you I’m sorry for everything I’ve done But when I call you never seem to be home
Things don’t get much jollier on the rest of the record. “River Lea” is a dark, propulsive collaboration with Danger Mouse—my favorite track, for the moment—in which Adele paints herself as a demanding, impossible-to-satisfy lover…
Sometimes I feel so lonely in the arms of your touch But I know that’s just me because nothing ever is enough
… before asserting in the chorus that she’s not going to change, so tough. Or maybe not. “If you’re going to let me down, let me down gently,” she sings on “Water Under the Bridge,” to my taste the album’s weakest cut, the closest 25 comes to generic pop. (Perhaps not coincidentally, this is also the lone track where Adele’s voice is submerged in a thick, busy mix—to the extent that Adele’s voice can be submerged.) On another cut, “Love in the Dark,” a beautiful if not very adventurous piano ballad (abetted by full orchestra), she throws up her hands altogether where romance is concerned:
I can’t love you in the dark / It feels like we’re oceans apart / There is so much space between us / Baby, we’re already defeated / Cuz everything changed me / And I don’t think you can save me
There are a couple of peppy, upbeat songs, including the joyous closer, “Sweetest Devotion,” but they seem to be addressed to her son rather than to any grown-up in her life, and those are outliers: elsewhere, this is an album steeped in nostalgia for exes, youth, the recent past, pretty much everything. This initially struck me as odd in a record called 25 that wasn’t made by someone in her 50s; but on second thought, nostalgia is a young person’s game, at least in my experience. (Those who can still remember the past are condemned to pine for it?) The album’s second single, “When We Were Young,” was in part inspired by “The Way We Were,” and for better or worse sounds like it. (In a shocking confession, Adele told Rolling Stone the older song made her cry when Barbra Streisand reprised it at the Oscars in 2013.) I prefer the similarly backward-looking “A Million Years Ago,” which has a samba-like lilt and a seductive melody. (Adele is backed by a single acoustic guitar.) The album’s thematic centerpiece might be “All I Ask,” yet another piano ballad—Bruno Mars is a co-writer—with a churchy, rolling quality that puts me in mind of Carole King or Elton John. Here we find Adele preparing to yearn for a lover who hasn’t yet gotten lost:
All I ask / Is if this is my last night with you / Hold me like I’m more than just a friend / Give me a memory I can use. . . . It matters how this ends / Because what if I never love again?
Poor Adele. I hope she can take comfort in the fact that, however blue she feels, anguish becomes her. She sings even her dopiest, mopiest lyrics with such force and conviction that, well . . . you try resisting. These latest fruits of her sorrow will make her label, Sony, very, very happy, I’m sure. And I’ll go further: as a confessional blockbuster, 25 will prove a worthy successor not just to 21 but also Tapestry, Rumours, andJagged Little Pill. I think it’s got the goods. So Merry Christmas! Meow!
UPDATE: Since this review was first published, it has been amended to reflect the fact that Aretha Franklin has indeed covered “Rolling in the Deep”.
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