BackLounge Loves: Adele's '25'
Each song on this album has the potential to get stuck in your head
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It’s an autumn evening, and Adele is at a coffee shop across the table from the man she loves. He’s having a bleak day and she’s comforting him by telling him everyone goes through rough times. Then, just as she is describing his pain, a note swells and is held with vibrato so strong that the coffee cup turns around to listen. “Oops, I didn’t mean to sing," Adele giggles. The next thing he knows, she’s promising him she’ll be his remedy and floating into falsetto, doing a run that seems to cut through the air it has been breathed into.
That’s the image Remedy, the fifth song on Adele’s new album, 25, conjures. Adele’s singing is so effortless that one can imagine her just sitting down trying to read the lyrics but slipping into beautiful inflections just because they come so naturally to her. The complete ease with which Adele deploys her masterful instrument is what grips you on 25. You just have to sit back in awe at how she can achieve a perfect combination of character and power in her voice and sound like she’s not even trying that hard.
On every song on 25, whether she’s using her lower range on the wistful Million Years Ago or belting out the high notes on heartbreak ballads Hello and All I Ask, Adele sounds like she’s using only the notes her voice sounds best in.
The album does use certain tested methods: the sad songs use plenty of minor chords and weeping violins, the lighter ones are heavy on percussion and the powerful, headbang-with-a-shampoo-as-a-mic tracks use urgent rhythms. One may even accuse Adele of repeating the theme of singing about past love—six out of the 11 songs on 25 are about it—and of losing some of the cheek and honest bitterness she had on 19, which was so beautifully raw that it sounded like a long drunk dial to a cheating ex.
But what makes Adele an undeniable great is not the compositions or lyrics of her songs but how she so vividly delivers the message of each song with effortless but carefully planned vocals. With subtle changes to the way she phrases lines or the textures she adds in her vocals, she makes her voice sound different on every song. On When We Were Young, you can feel the nostalgia thanks to the beautiful break in her voice. On River Lea, a song about guilt, she cuts off the ends of her sentences as if she does not want to say what she is saying.
When you are as popular as Adele is, every album is going to come with its share of expectations. But here’s the bottom line about 25: each one of the 11 tracks on the album has the potential to get stuck in your head.
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