Return of Adele gratifying
Absence has a way of ossifying an idea and amplifying a legend.
These have been gifts for Adele, who recently returned from a break of almost five years with her third album, 25.
Her place in pop music held steady as she retreated from the spotlight, toward a more nourishing life that includes motherhood. And time has fixed the notion of Adele’s sound, leaving a brightly blinking beacon to which she could return.
To that end, 25 manages to
sound all of a piece, even as the songs veer from phenomenal to tepid. In places, everything comes together.
Million Years Ago bursts with melodrama and perhaps has a quiet echo of Mariah Carey’s My All amid the flamenco-esque guitar.
Hello, the album opener, begins with an invitation: “Hello, it’s me / I was wondering if after all these years you’d like to meet.”
This is Adele at her savviest: Hello functions as an extended hand to old fans and also a seeming chapter-closer on the relationship that defined 21, her last album. The song rocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard charts.
On songs such as I Miss You and Water Under the Bridge, she renders the most acute pain with severe clarity and composure. If her singing weren’t so loud, it would be tranquil. In places — on Hello and Million Years Ago, for example — so total is her chill that she recalls a far less technically accomplished but even more steadfastly serene singer: Lana Del Rey.
And so firm is her vision that it rescues unambitious songs such as Remedy, written with and produced by Ryan Tedder, and River Lea, written with and produced by Danger Mouse — which might otherwise drown in numbing organ.
Love in the Dark, about the last embers of a dead relationship, moves at a funereal pace, but Adele issues her self-loathing like a command: “Take your eyes off of me so I can leave / I’m far too ashamed to do it with you watching me.”
Pop moves and mutates, but Adele more or less does not. Naming her albums for different ages in her life doesn’t indicate radical changes but rather reinforces the reassuringly slow march of time.
What sets her apart are a gargantuan and smooth voice, deployed with casual control, and a cathartic fluency with heartbreak.
On 25, she remains a plainly declarative singer and songwriter. She’s emphatically firstperson and doesn’t get belabored or obstructed by metaphor or concept.
She also offers little in the way of emotional surprise: For Adele, distress is restorative. (The album closes with Sweetest Devotion, a blast of optimism so saccharine that it threatens to upend the 40 minutes of anguish preceding it.)
Where 21 made gestural concessions to contemporary pop music, 25 largely does not. It comes closest on Send My Love (to Your New Lover), which was produced by Max Martin and Shellback. They haven’t varnished Adele, the way they have with so many before her.
The song begins with a stray studio comment from Adele — “Just the guitar. OK, cool” — before about a minute of acoustic guitar.
This is Adele the pop refusenik — still intact.
But then the thickly layered harmony vocals and fuller arrangement arrive, faintly echoing the thunderous drop in I Knew You Were Trouble, by Taylor Swift. There is a Swiftian moment, too, on the song’s chorus, when she sings “lover” like a cheerful taunt. Adele’s message usually is one of shared melancholy. Hearing her sass is refreshing.