Adele: 25

ADELE: 25 (2015)

1) Hello; 2) Send My Love (To Your New Lover); 3) I Miss You; 4) When We Were Young; 5) Remedy; 6) Water Under The Bridge; 7) River Lea; 8) Love In The Dark; 9) Million Years Ago; 10) All I Ask; 11) Sweetest Devotion.

"Hello. It's me. I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet, to go over everything". Kind of a humble start for a mega-star whose millions of fans have been dying for years to see just where Adele's journey of spiritual growth would take her next. And if press release stuff and Wikipedia rumors have anything to them, this journey was actually in danger of coming to a premature end — she had expressed a desire for early retirement, either due to pressures of family life or because she had an inclination that, perhaps, 21 had her at the top of her game and that it would have been so much cooler to go out on top.

And yes, it would. Most good stories in the 21st century tend to have crappy sequels, and with 25, our little fairy tale, too, seems to have exhausted the limits of good taste and creativity and turn into its own crooked mirror image. Honestly, I was not expecting that any follow-up to 21 could match the cohesive greatness of that record — but neither was I expecting such a direct, express jet trip to Crapsville. And what makes matters so much worse is that 21, like it or not, had a great educational value: through those songs, millions of people had access to solid melodies, real soul, and genuine instrumentation, not to mention a chance to get interested in Time Out Of Mind and Disintegration. For a brief moment out there, it seemed like here was a really strong-willed, independent woman artist that could lead the masses — or even, with a stroke of luck, dictate her own terms to the corporate music industry.

But no dice. Enter 25, a thoroughly disappointing, bland, formulaic record of big «adult contem­porary» ballads, produced by no less than eleven different producers, co-written by Adele with no less than the same number of different songwriters, and featuring no real spiritual growth what­soever. The only new emotional strand is that of nostalgia and forgiveness — the Adele of 21 seemed preoccupied with her current troubles, the Adele of 25 seems to be looking for artistic in­spiration largely in past troubles ("they say that time's supposed to heal you, but I ain't done much healing"); no wonder, since it does not look like she'd had a lot of troubles for the previous four years. A happy marriage, a son, a well-secured financial present and future, plenty of charity work — no wonder that now, in order to keep up the broken-hearted image, she has to turn her mind back on the past.

And it does not work. We could, of course, put most of the blame on the producers, who did their best to dress all of these melodies in the most generic rhythms and sonic textures; but I believe that no one is more to blame than Adele herself, who just so clearly did not need to put out this album — it is so utterly unnatural, so strenuously pushed into unnecessary existence, that the only frickin' question is: WHY? Goddammit, if you are so obviously content with your life, why do you consider yourself obligated to put out a collection of dark, morose, monotonous ballads with conventional frameworks and clichéd hooks (or «non-hooks»)? Just because you are «Adele, the Queen of the Dark Heart-Tug?» and people would not buy your records if you preferred to cover ʽBanana Boat Songʼ instead?

The opening piano chords of ʽHelloʼ may aspire to genius simplicity, but I wonder just how many by-the-book balladeers have already made my ears insensitive to their effect — and the «depth» that opens up when the powerhouse chorus hits you is phoney, a well-rehearsed production trick more than a genuine reflection of one's state of mind. By the time the song kicks into full gear, electronic hums and drum machines and cavernous echoes dominating the waves, you don't seem to remember the difference between Adele and Celine Dion any more. Is this it, then? That «maturity» by the age of 25 means completing your transformation into a generic «Diva»?

It does not get much better when the songs get upbeat, though. ʽSend My Loveʼ starts out with a quiet, but well-audible "just the guitar!" instruction, which turns out to be a ruse — fairly soon, we get a trip-hop backing track of the teenybopper variety, aerobic backing vocals à la Beyonce, and an annoying synthetic chorus — "we gotta let go of all of our ghosts, we both know we ain't kids no more", on a track that has the most kiddyish arrangement of 'em all. No wonder, that, since it was co-written with Max «I Fucked 'Em All, Figuratively Speaking» Martin, the man to whom you turn when Mephistopheles is unable to hold up his end of the bargain.

There is only one song on the entire album, as far as I'm concerned, that strives to break out of the plastic carcass — the gospel-influenced ʽRiver Leaʼ, produced by and co-written with Danger Mouse; although the arrangement is still spoiled by a robotic rhythm section, the organ adds a nice touch, the chorus is catchy, and the main hook is wond'rously found, with Adele hitting a compassionate note on the "blame it on the River Lea, the River Lea..." passage. Which makes me wonder if, at this point, she couldn't have made a fine 21st century Mahalia Jackson — at least singing about going back to the river seems to bring out the human in her far more effective­ly than trying to rile herself over some forgotten past lovers.

Alas, one such bit of success does nothing to alleviate the «dull aching pain» from listening to one forgettable ballad after another — sometimes exacerbated when the song in question is ʽMillion Years Agoʼ, a truly awful acoustic «tear-jerker» that sounds as if it's been pulled directly from one of those whip-out-yer-hanky Euro musicals like Notre Dame De Paris: listening to Adele crooning "I miss the air, I miss my friends, I miss my mother, I miss it when life was a party to be thrown..." just makes me cringe in its absolutely cheap corniness.

How the heck did this happen? How and when and why did the master songwriter and performer of 21 turn into this replaceable Kelly Clarkson-meets-Vanessa Carlton type plastic doll? Sure, we still have «The Voice», but it's obviously not just the voice that made 21 such an outstanding achievement. My natural guess is simply that the artist... has nothing more to say. That's just it. She said what she had to say — she made a wise decision that she would not be saying any more — she was forced to come back because she has no other profession, because the fans and the record executives cry for more, she placed herself in the hands of studio pros, she wrote those songs without properly feeling them, she delivered them because that was what she was expected to do. Oh, and she even got plenty of rave reviews — «style instead of substance» is all the rage nowadays, and when you're a big star with a properly run publicity campaign, naturally there'll be plenty of people falling over your lyrical clichés and thrice rehashed Serious Chords. But hey, you can always rely on good old Only Solitaire to cut the crap.

In other words, here is one more case of an artist metamorphosing into a pseudo-artistic machine. If your reaction is, "well, she was never all that good anyway", I respectfully disagree: 19 was nice and human, warts and all, and 21 was as close to a genuine, sincere masterpiece as commer­cially-oriented «serious pop music» ever gets. But this — this is as good a pretext as any to change that old adage of «never trust anybody over thirty» to «never trust anybody over twenty five», as more and more artists these days flash by like the one-album wonders (two-album won­ders at best) they are. Oh sure, there's always some fickle hope that the next album (31, if that particular arithmetic progression continues to be respected?) will make things right, but who wants to spend the next six years in fickle hopes? Thumbs down, case closed.

Adele: Live At The Royal Albert Hall

ADELE: LIVE AT THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL (2011)

1) Hometown Glory; 2) I'll Be Waiting; 3) Don't You Remember; 4) Turning Tables; 5) Set Fire To The Rain; 6) If It Hadn't Been For Love; 7) My Same; 8) Take It All; 9) Rumour Has It; 10) Right As Rain; 11) One And Only; 12) Lovesong; 13) Chasing Pavements; 14) I Can't Make You Love Me; 15) Make You Feel My Love; 16) Someone Like You; 17) Rolling In The Deep.

Not a lot of people, I would guess, get to play the Albert Hall upon releasing only two albums. To the skeptics, this would probably mean a gruesomely played out PR campaign — and to the idea­lists, it would be a confirmation that here we finally have something really great, really other­worldly, so phenomenally talented that even the tightassed music industry bosses have to kowtow before this unbelievable power of a 21-year old upstart who doesn't even have the sex appeal of a Taylor Swift. And in a way, both the skeptic and the idealist would be right.

The album, actually, is not a «proper» CD release: the entire concert was predictably captured on video, and comes in DVD format with all the tracks duplicated on an audio CD. However, I do feel, upon both watching and listening, that this is an important release in «The Extraordinary Story Of Adele A.», deserving of its own brief review — not to mention that it did sell around 3 million copies worldwide, and hit No. 2 on the UK charts as well, which is fairly impressive for a live album these days.

First of all, the setlist is a little discomforting — with only two albums behind her back, she re­produces 21 almost in its entirety, with less than half of 19 getting an honorable mention; surely at least such highlights as ʽDaydreamʼ or ʽCold Shoulderʼ deserved, well, more than a cold shoul­der. Some of the reasons could be technical — for instance, much of the material on 19 was ra­ther sparsely arranged, leaving out many members of her current touring band (which, for this particular occasion, also includes a small orchestra), or perhaps she already thought of some of those early songs as tentative or even «dated». But it wouldn't have hurt, then, to compensate maybe with some obscurities or covers, considering how she has the same knack for doing Bob Dylan or The Cure as she has for her own songs.

Second, the lady has an obvious stage problem — not so evident on the audio CD, which gene­rously cuts out all the banter, but very irritating on the DVD, where almost every song is intro­duced with around two to five minutes of narrative on life experience told in prime quality Tot­tenham dialect. Frankly speaking, the few bits I did manage to understand were neither too in­sightful nor particularly funny, and overall, the impression was very much the same I get from listening to Ani DiFranco live albums: the artist is trying way too hard to come across as a «real human being» — in a sense, this really comes across as a condescending gesture: trying to get the audience to relax and shed its tenseness and confusion in the presence of The Great Artist, who is really The Average Everyday Person in artistic disguise. (Also agrees with the swearing — heavy use of the F-word is one of the true features of the AEP, and so, in the good old tradition of Pete Townshend and Co., there is plenty of that there. One might ask why the heck isn't there any ac­tual swearing in the songs, then — oh, right, to avoid radio censorship.)

Fortunately, this talkative attitude does not seep in much into the music, other than a few evil cackles every now and then that she inserts at the end of the songs to beat down the pathos level (see ʽRumour Has Itʼ, for instance). The music is flawless — since she is no R&B queen and does not feel the need to flutter around the stage, this allows her to fully concentrate on the singing, and every single tune is done at least as well as on the original version, and occasionally maybe even better. (She does not play any instruments here, although she used to in the early days of 19 — but now that she can afford as many backup players as she needs, why bother?). The only dis­appointment is ʽRollin' In The Deepʼ, where a large chunk of the chorus vocals is given over to the audience — when the first "we could have had it all..." comes along and Adele is not in it at all, that's sort of a bummer. But I guess it must have felt different back there: audience participa­tion feels like a total gas until you get to hear it reproduced on an audio recording.

Anyway, returning to the beginning of the review, Live At The Royal Albert Hall really does show that the Adele phenomenon owes its success to about fifty percent genius and fifty percent meticulous image calculation — which is alright by me, since that's the way it's been since the Beatles, heck, since Mozart and Liszt, I guess. By all means, the DVD is epochal and a must-have, capturing all the strengths and weaknesses of the artist at the same time: in fact, despite the gene­rally negative feel I have about this wound-up stage image, the contrast between how she looks and sounds when chattering away and when singing one of her soulful ballads or rhythmic stom­pers is strong enough to make you appreciate «Adele the artist» even more than you did before you got the chance to «know» a little bit of her as «Adele the commoner». Thumbs up.

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Adele: 21

ADELE: 21 (2011)

1) Rolling In The Deep; 2) Rumor Has It; 3) Turning Tables; 4) Don't You Remember; 5) Set Fire To The Rain; 6) He Won't Go; 7) Take It All; 8) I'll Be Waiting; 9) One And Only; 10) Lovesong; 11) Someone Like You; 12*) If It Hadn't Been For Love; 13*) Hiding My Heart; 14*) I Found A Boy.

Captain Obvious suggests that 21 can refer to two more years of growth and experience for Adele after her debut with 19; Captain Irony, however, argues that it really reflects the number of male human beings that managed to break Adele's heart and dump her body in the interim — the best available explanation for the fact that profanated, betrayed, and simply lost love is just about the only lyrical and emotional subject of the record. (Unless, of course, "We could have had it all, rolling in the deep" is really supposed to be sung from the perspective of Dick Cheney — or, clo­ser to home, Gordon Brown — but that's pushing philological analysis a bit too far).

Anyway, "rumor has it" that there has really only been one painful break-up, but she capitalized on it quickly and richly enough. Considering that approximately 99% of music that tries to com­bine «commercial orientation» with «seriousness» is about broken hearts — the only serious to­pic that is considered safe enough for our fragile brains — it would be impossible to approach 21 wi­thout prejudice. But on the other hand, in Adele's case it does represent a little bit of that «grow­ing backwards» thing I mentioned in my review of 19: cutting down on the over-acted romantic mys­ticism in favour of a little more grit and, well, honesty, pardon the expression.

So? On its own terms — a proverbial blue-eyed soul album about emotional pain — 21 is a mas­terpiece, definite proof that 19 was no fluke and that, together, the two records will make musical history even if they are not followed by 23, 25... 99. Yes, occasionally she still has this unsettling tendency to slip into faceless formula: 'Turning Tables', while not bad, is that kind of «sensitive girl wailing by the piano» thing that is generated by the likes of Vanessa Carlton and cloned in­cessantly on an almost daily basis; and 'He Won't Go' leans dangerously close to conventional mo­dern R'n'B, particularly the verse melody which could as well have come from Beyoncé. Well, she can't do it on her own, after all, and since this is not indie music we're speaking of, there are bound to be some concessions to the crappy standards.

All of them are, however, in an absolute minority next to her own songwriting and singing. It is goddamn hard to make a soul tune memorable — there is always the temptation to just hang it all on the «soul» itself, as if the very fact that you let, or pretend to let, a supernatural force possess you behind the microphone should be enough for claiming a Classic Moment in Pop Music. She does not: the songs are cleverly written, with hooks, interesting melodic twists, sometimes, exci­ting arrangement decisions ('Rumor Has It', because of the booming percussion, has an almost Tom Waits-ish Bone Machine-like quality to it), captivating build-ups and fade-outs — stuff that you rarely, if ever, expect to find in an album like this.

I dare anyone to challenge the technical perfection, for instance, with which the drama unfolds in 'Rolling In The Deep', a song that is like the musical equivalent of a series of uniformly acce­le­rating snowballs rolling downhill — and all of it achieved through a relatively minimal arrange­ment (guitar, piano, drums, and backing vocals arriving on the scene one after the other in a sub­tle manner). Or 'Set Fire To The Rain', with the finest chorus on the album — this time, she does it on a grand scale, but a fully adequate one; the song is anthemic and pretentious, and to justify it, she taxes her voice to the max, and hits the jackpot.

The album is often described as a «retro» experience — most of the time, I did not really get that feeling, unless we automatically consider any album that stays away from electronics to be «re­tro». That said, some of the songs are built on soul and R'n'B rhythms popular around the 1970s: 'Don't You Remember', 'I'll Be Waiting', 'One And Only', and, just like the best songs from that decade, each is based around a singularly impressive chorus. Ah, that good old fashioned way of naming your song after its major vocal hook — one glance at the title and you can remember how it goes in an instant.

It's not as if she has invented a new way of looking at breakups, of course, and it's not very likely that one will always enjoy all the songs equally (my disfavourites include 'He Won't Go', the sli­ghtly Celine Dion-ish 'Take It All', and the overlong Latinized take on The Cure's 'Lovesong', al­though it's sort of okay for the first two minutes), but the bottomline is: if you already loved 19, you can't go wrong with the next odd number, and if you were skeptical, 21 is liable to signi­ficant­ly exceed your expectations the way it exceeded mine.

Thumbs up — now you have one more reason to watch the videos and vent your dark impulses by commenting on the size of her cheeks along with the regular low-life forms that inhabit YouTube. For that matter, if you happen to disagree with my subjective assessment, here is an alternative review of 'Rolling In The Deep' for your pleasure taken from that particular source (whoever said that evolution rarely, if ever, works backwards?):

LOL this song is abslolute fucking SHIT! i thought this fat slag had fucked off and what do u know, shes back fatter and shitter than ever! fuck adele and all her shit cunt followers fuck off CUNTS!

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Adele: 19

ADELE: 19 (2008)

1) Daydreamer; 2) Best For Last; 3) Chasing Pavements; 4) Cold Shoulder; 5) Crazy For You; 6) Melt My Heart To Stone; 7) First Love; 8) Right As Rain; 9) Make You Feel My Love; 10) My Same; 11) Tired; 12) Hometown Glory.

As of 2009, Adele Laurie Blue Adkins is one of the freshest arrivals in an interminable series of young, gifted girls living in prosperous Western society and suffering from acute psychic im­balance that forces them into a life of songwriting. Nine times out of ten, there is no middle ground with these ladies: one portion of the population, large or small, falls madly in love with them, and the other one just hates them for being boring, pretentious, and basically expendable, thinking — not without reason — that the world has been oversaturated with their "soulfulness" to such a degree that the very word "soul" has become completely devalued.

Another reason for cool people to hate Adele is her commercial success. Which, and it is a stone cold fact, was almost mathematically calculated: the album's singles, 'Chasing Pavements' and 'Cold Shoulder', are just the kind of relatively simple, but catchy adult pop that UK charts seem to have developed a particular attraction for. (Arguably, it's these two particular songs that also sound the closest to Amy Winehouse, to whom people keep comparing Adele — generally unjustly, as she's got a much more folksy vibe to her than Amy). Of course, UK charts these days are somewhat more tolerant about decent music than US ones, but still, soulful female singer-songwriters that sell lots of records are by definition a suspicious lot.

I do not find the slightest reason to believe that this dame, or her music, is a fake, though. Her weak points are the lyrics, which she probably thinks original and some probably find inspira­tional — but it's just that there's a point at which trying to express the same old same old feelings in new "deep" ways becomes a cliché in itself. Today, whenever I hear a song begin with lines like 'Daydreamer, sitting on the sea, soaking up the sun, he is a real lover, of making up the past and feeling up his girl like he's never felt her figure before', I can't help asking myself: 'Say, what happened to the old 'when I feel that something, I wanna hold your hand' routine?' Lyrically, she doesn't have anything to say that you don't already know, unless you belong to the younger gene­ration that refuses to trust anyone over 30, much less over 64 like Paul McCartney.

But in terms of pure meaningless (or, at least, verbal meaning-less) sound, she's a different matter. She's got a great voice — strong, just a tad raspy, stuck somewhere in between folk and jazz style — and an excellent sense of phrasing. And she doesn't merely rely on it, but makes it an integral part of her musical world, which is truly a musical world, not just some sensitive hack banging away at a grand piano (the Soft stereotype) or slashing out the same old grunge chords on a cheap electric guitar (the Hard stereotype). She writes interesting vocal, and occasionally instrumental, melodies, and arranges them in miriads of ways: starting out on solo acoustic, then shifting to retro-jazzier territory, then going all-out modern pop on the hit singles, then leaving out all but a set of chimes... the piano really arrives only on the last track, 'Hometown Glory', but, to tell the truth, the song could use any kind of arrangement as long as the vocal hooks stay.

So I find myself in an odd position. I honestly, sincerely do not care for Adele's inner torment. I do not care for it one instant because for a girl who is only 19 — and who insists on your knowing it — this kind of inner torment is gruesomely inadequate. 19-year old girls should, at best, be singing 'come on babe, come see about me', just like 19-year old boys should be singing about wanting to hold your hand. Maybe I've grown insensitive, but blame it on the legions of Adeles, all of which strive to achieve Shakespeare-tragedy level on their debut album because these days, you've got to be "mature" to be taken seriously.

Yet I cannot not acknowledge the talent — the hit singles, 'Hometown Glory', 'Tired', 'Crazy For You' and some other tunes have made an impression on me, and if the heaviness of their lyrics and the self-importance were cut back to match the delightful airiness and inventiveness of their melodies, I might have warmed up to the record immediately rather than after a handful of listens it took me to go beyond the initial "oh no, not that whiny 2000-teenager crap again". So here's hoping this girl, like Benjamin Button, will be growing backwards on her next albums — because otherwise, failing to become the next Joni Mitchell, she faces the imminent threat of becoming the next, ugh, Vanessa Carlton.

And so, in the heart vs. brain thing, the sympathetic heart tells the indignant brain to shut off for a minute and wins the battle with a solid, if not overwhelming, thumbs up. Will the brain eventual­ly have the upper hand? Let’s wait for the next record.

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