What is your relationship with Adele? Maybe you're one of the 277-odd million people who have streamed Easy on Me on Spotify, awaiting a return to permissible (even encouraged) long-form heartbreak. Or you might be waiting for the delivery of some other artist's LP, cursing pop music and everything it stands for because Adele decided to press 500,000 copies of her latest album during a vinyl shortage. Either way, Adele is on our minds.
What is on Adele Adkins’s mind at 33? The same heartbreak that fuelled her breakthrough, with 21, and shot her to global stardom, with 25, persists on 30, a record of melodrama, ballads and a hint of 1960s soul.
“I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart,” she begins on Strangers by Nature, played with all the warm timbre of an old gramophone. Sweeping strings, mournful organ and Adele’s signature vocal range comfortably move through the paces. “All right, then, I’m ready,” she says at the close of the song. It’s a welcome injection of Adele the likable celebrity-who’s-just-like-us, before she batters us with woe again.
The almost seven-minute To Be Loved will nourish the grief tourists and annoy the daylights out of anyone who wants to get on with it. Nonetheless, you'd listen to Adele sing the phone book, even at this funereal pace
With song titles like Love Is a Game, Cry Your Heart Out and I Drink Wine, there’s a sense that we’re getting exactly what we’ve asked for: lyrics to text your jilted friends, to cry in the bath to, to play the character of the thirtysomething Adele-listener who is giving up on love. “Soaking it all up for fun, but now I only soak up wine,” she sings on the last of those three tracks. “How can you not see just how good for you I am?” she asks on Woman Like Me. A lesser vocalist, with lesser arrangements, wouldn’t get away with some of the histrionic proclamations, but Adele is no ordinary diva, and she pulls it off (for the most part).
Sonically, at least, it's not all doom and gloom. The thumping bass drum and handclaps of Oh My God hark back to the era of Rolling in the Deep, when she was caught up in the post-Amy Winehouse frenzy of jazz-inspired chart singers. Can I Get It swaps piano balladry for steely acoustic guitars and whistles, but while the background whoops in the verses might be a homage to Serge Gainsbourg, the chorus is more like Ed Sheeran at his most chart-focused. The almost seven-minute To Be Loved is as drawn out as a Taylor Swift short film, which will nourish the grief tourists and annoy the daylights out of anyone who wants to get on with it. Nonetheless, you'd listen to Adele sing the phone book, even at this funereal pace.
There isn’t a single shock over these 12 tracks, all of which sound, essentially, like Adele songs, but the nods to Hollywood scores, 1960s soul and even her own back catalogue inject the melodrama needed to pull off the more languished ballads. If you’ve recently experienced heartbreak, your prescription is thus: take once a week with plenty of water; do not exceed the stated dose. For the rest of us, it’s a tonic.
