British singer Adele has always been more than just a pretty voice. Though she’s blessed with a mighty instrument – a resonant alto that stretches to gleaming heights – what has made her singing stand out is its instinctive quality, her willingness to jump into a song heart-first.
Where many contemporary pop stars are concerned with projecting attitude, Adele understands the value of unfettered emotion. Judging by her new project ’25’ out Nov. 20, the four years since Adele’s last studio album have provided plenty of fodder in this arena.
Titled, like her previous efforts, for the year that inspired the record, the collection at first suggests an artist closer to 35, or even a decade older than that. There’s a recurring sense of youth flying by, or a longing as if it’s already passed. There’s no extended adolescence for this millennial, apparently.
The stark opening piano chords of Hello, the first single, set an almost funereal tone. “Hello from the other side,” she belts, her singing seeming a tad less husky than in the past, perhaps as a result of her surgery following the vocal problems that thwarted her 2011 tour.
But she sounds as strong and as vulnerable as ever, her voice sometimes threatening to break at the end of a note, only to come back in full, aching force.
“The other side” is not the afterlife, but our time on earth following early adulthood. Other songs, too, approach the passage of time with the kind of dark romanticism a young singer would more typically use to describe a dangerous lover. “You still look like a movie, you still sound like a song/My God, this reminds me of when we were young,” she sings to a former flame on When We Were Young.
On A Million Years Ago, a bit of melancholic nostalgia that could be a lost Jacques Brel tune, she remembers when “life was a party to be thrown,” and laments that old acquaintances “don’t recognize me in the light of day.”
The co-writers and producers on 25, among them Greg Kurstin and Adele’s Rolling In the Deep collaborator Paul Epworth, craft tracks that sound lush but are also spacious, wisely keeping Adele’s vocals in front – even on more muscular numbers such as the galloping Water Under the Bridge and I Miss You, with its thick, insistent percussion. Love In The Dark is the only song featuring strings; on it, Adele begs, “Take your eyes off of me so I can leave.”
25 ends on an uplifting note, though, with the chiming Sweetest Devotion, a love song to Adele’s three-year-old son. “I’ve been looking for you, baby, in every face that I’ve ever known,” she sings. Take heart, aging kids: Maturity and responsibility have their rewards as well.
Adele darling, you are rolling higher than ever with this album babe… it’s a winner!
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