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Rating: Excellent |
Autobiography is baked into Adele’s art. She titled her first album 19 , after her age at the time of writing, and like musical millennial Michael Apted, each successive album represented a different chapter in her life story. Fueled by heartbreak, her incendiary 2011 record 21 heralded her entry into adulthood and superstardom, two acts that played a role in the creation of 25 , the 2015 album that reportedly documents her mid-20s.
Between 21 and 25, Adele fell in love and started a family, an event that would surely be grist to a memoirist’s mill if Adele were as confessional a singer/songwriter as she seems, but she’s not. Like 21 before it, the love that flows through 25 is either blocked or lost, a love that can no longer replenish or nourish. It’s certainly not the kind of love that comes from a satisfying, stable relationship, but it is the kind of love that runs throughout 21: a love that hurts, not heals. While her themes remain the same, Adele is not the same singer she was in 2011, nor is 25 a carbon copy of 21.
Success has given her the confidence to abandon all Amy Winehouse influences, and with them any sense of swing or sass. Max Martin and Shellback give “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” a subdued, split electronic pulse, just enough rhythm to set it apart from the rest of the record. But this song and the cinematically stirring “Water Under the Bridge” — a song begging to be played during the credits of an inspirational biopic — lose out when compared to the wallop of “Rolling in the Deep.” This stateliness is intentional, commanding attention with both the full-force storm that is Adele’s voice and, not so coincidentally, her quietly good taste.
It's not that Adele isn't a risk-taker — she's hip enough to enlist Haim/Charli XCX's producer on "When We Were Young," a track co-written by acclaimed soul musician Tobias Jesso, Jr., and she enlists Danger Mouse to help orchestrate the neo-gospel of "River Lea." But she's so devoted to ballads, ballads determined to convey grace and strength in the face of loss, that she ends up stuck in the middle of the road, making herself seem much older than the quarter-century she inherits from the title.
Adele doesn’t help matters by dwelling on the passing of time, repeatedly returning to the idea that she’s no longer a child. It’s a sentiment befitting a singer who’s been well past 25 for many years, but it also suggests a bit of cleverness on her part: these are songs meant to be heard — and sung — years after the album’s initial release, gathering resonance as time passes. Fittingly, 25 also plays better over a longer period, its succession of slower numbers gradually revealing subtle emotional or musical distinctions. Make no mistake, its 11 tracks are all the same — shadowed by melancholy and powered largely by the performance — but that cohesive sound only serves to underscore how Adele has definitively claimed this arena of dignified heartbreak as her own.
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= Track List =
