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Exposed and bolder than ever: Adele's wonderful album delivers an unprecedented experience - Walla! culture

2021-11-21T20:52:03.893Z


Nearly a decade and a half since she came into our lives with "19," Adele proves she's not "just" a star. She is a gifted musician, perhaps the greatest performer we have ever known and an excellent songwriter


Exposed and bolder than ever: Adele's marvelous album delivers an unprecedented experience

Almost a decade and a half since she entered our lives with "19", and six long years since her third album established her status as a mega-star, on the new album Adele proves that she is not "just" a star.

She is a gifted musician, perhaps the greatest performer we have ever known and an excellent songwriter

Ben Byron Braude

22/11/2021

Monday, 22 November 2021, 00:00

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From "Adele: One Night Only", November 21, 2021 on yes and STINGTV (courtesy of yes and STINGTV)

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, one of a long line of written and filmed interviews after years of media silence, Adele explained why she chose her picture looking aside for the cover of her new album "30": "I love this picture because I can not look listeners in the eye. "That's how I feel. I thought to myself, 'They're going to hear my soul. They don't have to look into it either.'" This quote is wonderful not only because of its sincerity, but also because it quickly turns out to be true. "30", the British singer's fourth album in a row, provides listeners with an unprecedented experience, the singer's life is fulfilled here in a large number of shades, textures and layers. If you want, you will get Adele here in the augmented reality (AR) version, you can start wandering through her life through the songs and feel like this is your life.



The tour of Adele's life comes from exactly where her previous album - "25" ended - and accompanies her on the significant stops she has gone through since. The breakup of the marriage from Simon Conkey, her partner and her son Angelo's father, dealing with the paralyzing anxiety attacks, significant weight loss, alcohol withdrawal, life in Los Angeles and the relationship with athlete agent Rich Paul. Ironically, to this horribly intimate tour, everyone is welcome and invited. Along with the stylistic richness you will find here - Motown, jazz, pop, country, soul, reggae and delicate electronics (among others) - "30" provides mostly mental nudity, exposed and bolder than ever. Almost a decade and a half since she entered our lives with "19", and six long years since her third album established her status as a mega-star, on the new album Adele proves that she is not "just" a star. She is a gifted musician, perhaps the greatest performer we have ever known and an excellent songwriter.



"30" unlike its predecessors, is not just a collection of hits, it is a concept album.

In fact, Adele's announcement that her albums are named after the age she was at when she started writing them and what she went through at the time, sounds accurate here for the first time.

Even if it is not presented as such, the new album is in fact Adele's personal diary and we can open it and read everything she's been through.

It's a personal work by an artist who is more confident than ever, one that must be listened to continuously from beginning to end, one that in a few years' time will stand proudly alongside canonical works by the greatest artists: "Johnny" by Johnny Mitchell, "Tapestry" by Carol King and - "Back to Black" by the late Amy Winehouse.

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The album opens with "Strangers by Nature", a mesmerizing piece in its beauty, a tribute to Judy Garland and the old Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s. Accompanied by keyboards and strings, Adele sounds more mature than ever. "I'll take flowers to the cemetery in my heart / To all my present and past loved ones," she sings as her deep voice hovers over the orchestra, as if conducting over her through its powerful vibrato. Ludwig Goranson, a Swedish composer and producer responsible for, among other things, the soundtrack of "The Black Panther" alongside working with hip-hop creators such as Childish Gambino (Donald Glover), collaborates with Adele for the first time and the result is breathtaking. As part of those anxieties she talked about in interviews, this time Adele significantly reduced the number of partners for the work so that each name was carefully chosen. Guranson's unique talent for weaving together classical music and hip-hop, provides pieces that sound contemporary and timeless at the same time.



In a conversation with best friend Zayn Lowe for his show on Apple Music, Adele said the inspiration for the song came after watching the biographical film "Judy" about the life of the mythical singer and entertainer Judy Garland (Renee Zellweger won the Academy Award for the role). The conversation quickly developed into Adele's desire to create music that is not suitable for ticketing (to the disappointment of her managers of course), music for boys and girls her age, people in their thirties and forties, those who miss the music of yesteryear. Which perhaps explains her call for "picking up real music and real artists" at the end of her CBS special. In general, Adele's thirties (as you know, this year she celebrated her 33rd birthday) seem to find her in a nostalgic, personal and professional mood. As she has often said, family is the most important thing to her, as someone who grew up as a single and young mother, music played an important part in the home and the records played, whether rock, soul or jazz bands were deeply burned into her DNA.



After "Easy on Me", the first single from the album, and the most played song in the world as of this writing, "My Little Love" comes the first but not the last tear squeezer on the album and the most complex and brave songs she has ever recorded. Her previous album ended with "Sweetest Devotion", a pop-rock segment dedicated to her son Angelo who was still a toddler at the time. Today when he is 9 he gets another song, a song she hopes he will listen to in a few years and understand more about him. "My Little Beloved" is a long, mesmerizing and melancholy soul-R&B piece, it consists of delicate percussion instruments, minor keyboards, strings that press on the emotion glands and in the center a sequence of voice messages from Adele and Angelo. These messages were recorded as part of a psychological treatment, on the advice of the therapist who told her to record herself and the way she talks to Angelo so that she understands that she is not doing as bad a job as she thinks.

I know nothing about Adele's parenting skills (though I tend to believe she's a great mom), but when it comes to musicality she's definitely doing an amazing job, especially here. In less talented hands, this piece could have turned into a sleeping pill and another that arrives at the beginning of the album and scares away the listeners. Happily, Adele and close partner Greg Kerstin have created a first-time listening classic here, one that sounds like a poem about parental love, one that resonates with great solo artists such as Erica Bado, Angie Stone and Jill Scott. Here again her unrivaled writing and delivery skills stand out, as she manages to make even her most intimate voicemails sound like bits and pieces of all of us's lives.



Adele knows exactly what she's doing - as mentioned, on this album more than ever - and we immediately move on to a sequence of three rhythmic songs, stylistically different from everything that has been on the album so far and also from all the songs she has recorded in the past. It starts with "Cry Your Heart Out," a section that combines Motown and reggae and uses a contagious rhythm to talk about dealing with depression: "Cry your heart out, it will wash your face. If in doubt, move forward at your own pace." Here, and not for the last time on the album, Adele's writing and submission are reminiscent of those of Amy Winehouse in "Back to Black."



The comparison between her and the late Winhouse, accompanies Adele from the very beginning of her career, even when the latter was alive and she released her excellent debut album - "19".

Adele, like Amy, cites Carol King as one of the great influences on her writing, only it always seemed like Winehouse had the ability to distill sadness into music in a more sophisticated way.

Here - and again, as she testifies in the same interview with Zayn Lowe - Adele is no longer afraid to write soul pop, a sad and cynical dark.

The natural roughness in her voice is also reminiscent of Winehouse at its peak and all that is left is to be saddened by the fact that we do not live in a world where the two operate in parallel.

Fall in love with her instantly.

Adele (Photo: yes, Cliff Lipson / CBS)

Those who feared and were disappointed that Adele returned to our lives with a "boring" ballad and were looking for a more rhythmic and "younger" version of it, will immediately fall in love with the next two songs on the album: "Oh My God" and "Can I Get It". The first is a rhythmic pop-R&B segment in which Adele's voice touches new depths alongside electronic duplications reminiscent of lounge music and fine electronics. Already this past weekend with the release of the album and without receiving an official "boost", this song became one of the most played on streaming services so it is likely that his future as a single will be accompanied by a guaranteed invested clip.



This song is just a preparation for a segment that comes after it and in which Adele does simply - pop. Yes, after her previous collaboration with Swedish super producers Max Martin (Britney Spears, Coldplay and Who Not) and Shlebeck, brought us "Send My Love (To Your New Lover", which was a very careful pop, this time Adele does not take prisoners. Guitar, drums, percussion and whistles, Adele performs a completely contemporary song, one that can live in a tic-tac-toe. The words about the pursuit of a new love, one that does not begin and end between the sheets, will speak to many listeners. Does, but mostly the way she knows how to do it.This piece would sound like another generic pop in other hands but here it becomes a real anthem and the lightest moment on the album which is a real emotional shake.



The second half of the album, the one that depicts the growth out of the pain and depression after the breakup of the marriage, returns stylistically to safer places for Adele - Sol and Rhythm & Blues. It starts with "I Drink Wine," which she has already performed on CBS, and sounds much better on the album itself (trivia detail: she originally planned to release it in a 15-minute version). There is a kind of tribute here to the great songwriters of the seventies, Elton John and Bernie Topin who are especially fond of Adele. The text describes dealing with the anxieties at the beginning of a new relationship and the sweeping melody is mostly accompanied by keyboards (piano, organ, melodron) and great harmonies by Adele. Immediately after that comes "All Night Parking", a short segment (on an album that more than half of the songs cross the five-minute threshold) in which she does a "duet" with the late jazz pianist Errol Garner. The flirtatious text in which she just wants to free herself from her pursuits to be with her new lover, is again reminiscent of Amy Winehouse,But this time it's the young woman from the album "Frank". After more than half an hour of sadness, it's fun to hear Adele smile.

Exemplary album. Adele (Photo: Simon Emmett)

Every big journey has to come to an end and Adele ends the "30" with four powerful, dramatic and epic songs that will remind old fans, who may have been a bit lost, the Adele of yesteryear. Three of these songs were recorded with her new co-producer - Inflo (Dean Josiah Kober) creates a solo and an esteemed hip-hop who likewise comes from Tottenham. "Woman Like Me" is probably the only part that meets the definition of a "divorce song" that you will find on the album in which she stings the ex-Konki when she repeatedly explains that a woman like her he will no longer find (and she is right). The song that follows, "Hold On," has already been chosen to accompany Amazon's holiday broadcast and has been described by Oprah Winfrey as a timeless anthem. Adele recounts in it the deep abysses that have reached them, black thoughts of inaction, in the background an intensifying chorus composed of her close friends (not mentioned here in oil) asking her for "Hold On". The song ends with a sense of optimism that leads straight to the next section,The most dramatic on the album and perhaps also in her career.



Piano and sound are all there is here. Tobias Jesso Jr., the musician and producer with whom she recorded the hit "When We Were Young," accompanies Adele here on piano and lets her open her throat in the most exposed and wounded way on the entire album. The song that lasts almost seven minutes is a monologue sung to herself, a prayer that sums up the whole journey she has gone through up to this moment and a promise to be better. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Adele said she managed to play the song to her estranged father shortly before he passed away and did not stop crying. Fans who already now call it the best vocal performance of her career will have to remain disappointed because she has already stated that she has no intention of performing it live.



Almost an hour after she started the album with a wink to Hollywood (the city that has become her home in recent years) Adele closes "30" with a song that sounds like the ending scene in a huge musical. "Love is a Game", which was also produced by Inflo, is a great song in every sense, there is an entire orchestra here - strings, wind and drums and endless background sounds, applause and small, bastard harmonies that contribute to the baking of the seven-minute piece. It does not matter if you listen to this song in the gym, in the living room over a glass of wine or on the way to work, at the end you will want to stand, clap and ask her to return to the encore. Thankfully, all that separates you from the next listen is just the play button.



The question of whether Adele was able to meet the high expectations that were placed on her suddenly feels ridiculous.

Yes, this album breaks records and maybe even the records it set itself, but if before that it was measured mainly by commercial achievements, it seems that after all it is a great and extraordinary musician, one we did not know before and probably will not meet much after.

When and will she return to our lives again?

It is not known, one can perhaps take solace in the sentence with which she chose to close the album: "I'd do it all again" and perhaps see it as a hint of what is to come.

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Source: walla

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