Adele- “21”

Adele
Album: “21”
Rating: ★★★★½
Release (US): February 22, 2011

Adele is a daydreamer, a hurt soul, a slighted lover. But above all, she is a romantic. Her quixotic and amorous ballads on her newest album “21” are underscored by an odyssey of lyrical evolution and magnified by soulful mature vocals, powerfully laced with feelings of love, loss, anger and redemption. Adele wears her emotions on her sleeve.  She chronicles the tumult of young love that is lost, taking listeners on a journey of polar emotions, as she delivers number after number of heart-wrenching melancholy soul.

This 22 year-old British singer and song-writer recently penetrated the fame bubble in America, spreading her emotionally charged music all over the nation. The release of her newest album makes the beginning of a new wave of activity for the neo soul singer as she begins her North American Tour in May.

“Rolling in the Deep” headlines “21” as a bracing start to a stirring musical soliloquy. “There’s a fire starting in my heart reaching a fever pitch and it’s bringing me out the dark.”

Adele’s robust voice takes a listener by surprise. Her powerful vocals are matched by the steady poignant drumming in this first number that is then electrically charged with a climax of cymbal crashing and background chanting. “You’re gonna wish you, never had met me.” It is clear that Adele’s emotions are at the pinnacle of a fixation with unpredictable love, a theme that remains as this perpetual culmination of passion continues.

Over the course of the 11 track album, she covers a range of emotions, starting with anger and accusatory harangues to feelings of suppression and emotional defeat, from pathetic pleas for reciprocated yearning, to finally settling in with a resolved melancholy of a love lost forever.

Her vocals are unmatched in quality and forcefulness and the way in which she conveys herself through these brilliant lyrics, as bipolar as they may be, speaks to her maturity as a writer and her development into adulthood.  The fact of the matter is, she is a 22 year-old, singing about her experiences. The subtle genius of it all is that she thrusts herself so far deep into the feelings of a hopeless lover, the listener can feel them as if they were her own. Her lyrics have the power to pierce through emotional walls to the divide between the mind and heart. Her voice has the stamina to knock over those walls with a flood of sincerity, witty sass, and tainted soul.

These are not overly dramatic ballads filled with questionable situations that move listeners to debate the validity of the emotion behind the music. Adele’s tracks are musically mature. They are legitimate. When she delivers them with her convincing and freeing voice, you can’t help but join in her mourning.

Her delivery is a transforming one. Her performance on her previous album, “19,” debuted her soulful class. That soul has now evolved. This newest album, “21,” exhibits tenacious and solid vocals that are speckled with moments of fragility and innocence. Her voice has a new cultivated richness, lending itself to an almost gospel quality.

Her most poignantly stimulating song displays this unique balance of both strength and also vulnerability, underlined with a presence of somber regret, plaintive pleas, a journey towards resolved understanding, and a hope of a future stability in the absence of this lost love.  “Someone Like You,” describes Adele at her lowest point during a break-up. At this level of unending woe, she pictures herself 20 years in the future speaking to this former love. She imagines that she still is emotionally invested in this lover, yet he has moved on. She abandons feelings of anger and drama present in some of the previous tracks and replaces them with a mournful maturity that still somehow believes in the unrealistic. She wrestles with her emotions in the song, acknowledging that he has moved on, but still asking to be remembered. At this point, once the dramatic dust of the initial break-up has settled, she recognizes the qualities of love that she needs and comes to grips with reality. For a 22 year-old to chronicle the depths of such an emotionally volatile and transforming relationship is impressive.

Her tumultuous journey of “21” is sure to make anyone a hopeless romantic, even if the anguish of loosing love is insufferable, as Adele so poignantly says “sometimes it lasts in love and sometimes it hurts instead.”

Reviewed by: Alex Roland

Image taken from: adele.tv

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