Album review: Adele, 25

NZ Herald

20 Nov, 2015 03:15 AM3 mins to read

Adele's third album 25 finds her sticking mostly with conventional heartbreak ballads, but still creating songs with lasting appeal.

Adele sticks with mostly conventional ballads of heartbreak on her third album, but still creates songs of lasting appeal

Here's the slightly odd thing about reviewing Adele's new album - it probably won't make a blind bit of difference to whether or not you listen to it or buy it. Either you love Adele and you've already pre-ordered the album, or she's not really your thing, and though you might not object to hearing her in the supermarket, a critical appraisal of her songwriting on 25 isn't going to make you a fan.

Because the songwriting is really what we're focusing on here - by now it's a given that Adele has a strong, beautiful voice, and a talent for delivering lines with genuine emotion.

But while fans won't be disappointed by 25, there's also nothing terribly surprising, exciting, or even particularly new about these 11 tracks. Adele knows she's pretty good at conventional heartbreak-based ballads, and she has good taste when it comes to riding that line between being passionate and overwrought, so that's mostly what she's stuck to.

There are some thoughtful genre variations in the arrangements - there's chanson-like arpeggiated guitar accompaniment on Million Years Ago (which has a melody that owes plenty to Jacques Brel), some African-inflected percussion on the syncopated Send My Love (To Your New Lover) (which is the most overtly pop track on the album and seems like a nod to Lorde), the stadium anthem-esque qualities to the huge drums and electronic ambience on I Miss You, the RnB phrasing and harmony in Remedy, and the classic dance-pop beat of Water Under The Bridge.

There are some nice nuanced differences in her lyrical approach to affairs of the heart too. I Miss You is a straight up song of devotion, Remedy is a promise to help heal someone, Water Under The Bridge is about the inability to tear yourself away from someone you know is no good, All I Ask is a ballad of break-up acceptance.

So she's not singing about the same idea over and over, it's more that there's a tonal similarity across the album which does leave some tracks blending into the background, and the occasional nagging feeling that we've heard this from Adele before.

Some of it just doesn't quite meet the admittedly high bar she's set for herself - Love In The Dark, All I Ask, and Sweetest Devotion all have a generic, cliched feel. Particularly standing next to stand-out tracks like early single Hello, which is bold, tingling, and weighty in its simplicity, and the Danger Mouse produced River Lea which has a classic seductive, swaggering groove, and showcases a slightly huskier tone for Adele.

The most anticipated song on the album, her co-write with Tobias Jesso Jr, entitled When We Were Young, is an interesting one, because there's something quite obvious about it, but that turns out to be surprisingly appealing in Adele's hands.

It's like the musical equivalent of a great rom-com, lets say Love, Actually -- it's fairly unimaginative and even a little bit manipulative, but though it will potentially polarise people, it's also a classic because it captures a certain sentimentality. Maybe that's a good metaphor for 25 as a whole too: not a stunning work of art, but good enough to have lasting appeal.