Album Review: Adele - 30

Adele has broken time itself. Her music is timeless, sounding both thoroughly modern and utterly historic in the same breath, but it goes beyond that. Adele broke time by taking the entire music business back to its heyday, where the fever pitch building to an album's release was everything, and the sales exploded like the stock market in the dot-com bubble. To sell records in a time when records don't sell, and to do it by making music that goes against every notion of what is popular, is a feat of pure magic. It's almost as if she has the magical stopwatch from sci-fi stories, and used it to stop time long enough to put a copy of "25" in every household, before letting us wonder how her music feels so familiar.

After breaking sales records everyone assumed were relics of the past, Adele's newest takes on the similarly impossible task of being the defining 'divorce album' for the age of 'conscious uncoupling'. We have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of our psychology than we did in the days when bitter kiss-off songs were expected from any artist going through heartbreak. Are we ready for an album that takes the mature route, explaining that two people can grow apart and realize they don't belong together without there being any animosity between them? That's what we're going to find out.

"Easy On Me" made the case we could indeed do that. With a breezy sound and a vocal that toyed with being off-key on the falsetto runs, it was a raw and real embodiment of the emotions that come from even the best of bad endings. Adele is sad, but optimistic, asking not for our pity, but just a few moments to process what she has gone through. That's a mature way of looking at the situation, and when it's wrapped up in a gorgeous torch song, it comes across as the sort of lesson that should have been handed down through the generations, but never was.

Perhaps there is a disconnect here, however. Adele's power has always come from using her voice as a conduit for heartbreak and pain, and her more nuanced and dare I say optimistic approach to starting the next chapter of her life doesn't really fit with the strengths of the music she makes. "My Little Love" is a song about her son, and I'm sure it means the world to her, but between the slow to develop melody and the clips of voice messages that breaks up the flow, it fails to hold together as an engaging song. And stretching out over six minutes, it's simply too slow and cold a burn to set fire to kindling, much less the rain.

Then there are the backing vocals that open and often dominate "Cry Your Heart Out", which sound both shrill and auto-tuned past the point of death. It's such an annoying sound, tonally, that they stand in complete contrast to everything Adele has ever done. It doesn't feel natural, either in performance or in context of Adele's persona. I could say the same about "Oh My God", but it does at least follow the track taken by "Send Your Love (To My New Lover)". It doesn't dig in the same way, and the hook feels less potent, never giving Adele room to let her voice find her sweet spot.

Throughout the record, Adele feels too restrained. The songs don't take us through the full gamut of emotions she must have gone through, and her voice isn't allowed to tower over the music often enough, depriving us of the very gift that makes her so special. She described the end of her marriage as being tired of being unhappy, and that sense of tiredness is what I get most from the record. The end didn't come with furious anger, and the maturity that has been the best for her life has not been so fortunate when it comes to her music. This record almost sounds, well, small.

Other than "Easy On Me", the song that will become an Adele standard is "I Drink Wine", which is not only relatable for so many people (although not me - I cannot claim to like any form of alcohol), but a song that gives Adele the room to let her personality shine through. It's still laid-back, but this time because she knows she doesn't have to impress anyone. It just works here.

The thing about constantly raising the bar is that you will eventually put it too high to reach. The sales figures for "30" might indeed surpass anything we have ever seen before, but I can't say this record feels like a new zenith for Adele. I know I said the same thing when "25" came out, but that record had so much in it even on first listen that it's growth into her defining statement was not a surprise. I could have foreseen that, if I was trying to write for the future. I don't hear those same ores running through this record, waiting for me to hit upon them.

Maybe it's as simple as living two completely different lives, but I can't connect to these songs. It feels to me like Adele making an Adele record, rather than Adele needing to make an Adele record. This time, the torch is burning just a little dimmer.