Adele’s big, brash (and, occasionally, quietly powerful) new album
Adele is the Céline Dion it’s OK to like.
Not that it’s not okay to like Céline Dion, by any means. But the breathless anticipation with which the global music industry has awaited Adele Adkins’ latest album, 25, would be unimaginable today if the soulful London singer didn’t command the respect of the same tastemakers who would have publicly reviled “My Heart Will Go On” back in the day.
At the same time, Adele manages to draw the discretionary entertainment dollars of millions of casual record buyers — who, in recent years, haven’t really seemed motivated to pick up much but Taylor Swift’s 1989, the Frozen soundtrack and Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late in any great numbers — all while she’s doing essentially the same, overwrought thing that Dion was doing during her own march to world domination in the 1990s.
Don’t get your back up over that statement. Just recognize that Adele’s last album, 2011’s 21, sold a staggering 30 million copies worldwide and was the best-selling record on the planet for two years in a row at a moment in pop-culture history when everyone had all but given up on the idea of multi-million-selling albums.
Our Michael Bublé-lovin’, Susan Boyle-buyin’ moms and dads are the ones who made that happen, not readers of Stereogum. Adele has achieved pop universality by being pop-universal.
She follows through with flying, allthings-to-all-people colours on 25. Lead single and album opener “Hello” is an absolute, knee-knocking beast — a mournful, record-smashing monster that was downloaded more than a million times in the week following its Oct. 23 release — and the rest of the record delivers on a similar, big-’n’-goopy-but-still-tasteful level.
It’s all completely calculated, in its own way.
But it speaks to the power of Adele’s voice and the purity of her heart-baring vision that all the high-powered songwriting and production help involved in bringing 25 to life — Greg Kurstin, Danger Mouse and previous Adele right-hand-man Paul Epworth are among the A-list behind-the-scenes players — is merely there to ensure that Adele sounds as much like Adele as possible.
It’s not there to mould her into the sort of interchangeable pop starlet that Taylor Swift chose to become on 1989.
Even when ubiquitous hitmakers-for-hire Max Martin and Shellback intrude upon the uncharacteristically slinky and snaky “Send My Love (to Your New Lover),” the lingering results sound far more like the outcome of a genuine, “let’s see what happens” collaboration than the sort of “Write this man a single!” directive that yielded the Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face.”
True, 25 might benefit from holding back a bit more. “I Miss You” and “River Lea” pile on levels of rhythmic and choral bombast that would give Florence and the Machine pause, while “Water Under the Bridge” probably would have managed just fine on the strength of its sticky ’80s funk riff without the windblown, Sermon From the Mount production.
Then again, Adele isn’t exactly known for holding back, so it’s best simply to delight in the lavish, syrupy sentimentalism of songs such as the Tobias Jesso Jr. co-write “When We Were Young” or the Enya-checking finale “Sweetest Devotion” and admire just how well they do what they do.
That said, the most memorable song on 25 is its quietest and most reserved. A simple, plangent, acoustic ballad plucked out on nothing but guitar and bass, “Million Years Ago” tiptoes in towards the end of the record like a lost Burt Bacharach/Peggy Lee collaboration just when the more, more, more! of it all is starting to get exhausting and leaves you utterly stunned at how much more Adele can actually do with less. She doesn’t really need all the bells and whistles. In time, maybe she’ll trust herself to do without them.