Maybe once every decade, a female artist arrives out of nowhere and strikes gold (and then multi-platinum and diamond) with records that shouldn't have been successful given the current mainstream audience. The 80s had Madonna, the 90s had Alanis Morissette, while the 2000s saw Norah Jones skyrocket to ubiquity. And then, despite having been mildly present on the charts a couple years prior, British songstress Adele was elevated from anonymous torch singer to a monumentally profitable diva on her own terms. "21", her star making album, had a lot to do with that, selling 30 million copies globally and picking up seven Grammys because it was that good. In fact, it wasn't just good: it set the pop standard for the next five years. But why did it so? If every album full of break-up songs became a blockbuster like "21", Taylor Swift's income would equal Bill Gates' by now. The truth of the matter, is that Adele deliberately chose to maintain focus on her voice--certainly much better than any of her pop (and even soul) peers--the songs she was singing became a bit inconsequential, since they were catchy and driven by raw emotion, but lose their potency after being played to death and beyond on the radio. It didn't matter, though, because the 2010s was in dire need of someone with more than a pretty face or promotional gimmick, someone who brought a performance to their songs, rather than a vacant reading. That, and quite honestly, it was outstandingly refreshing to see a genuine talent eager to share her music, and not her arrogance, with anybody who cared to listen.
That modesty is what sets up Adele's enormously anticipated third album, "25". Instead of being empowered by her success, Adele scales back her ambition and focuses inward, creating a warm collection of substantial ballads and searing mid-tempo jams. Lead single "Hello" captures this approach better than any other song on "25"; even better actually, because it not only recaptures the intense emotional power of "Rolling in the Deep" or "Chasing Pavements", but it manages to strip the arrangement to its bare minimum, yet still retains that sense of drama that made "21" such an unexpected blockbuster. It's unfortunate, then, when "Hello" ends and the album crawls through the rest of its tracks, because the realization sets in that no matter how hard she tried, Adele was never going to re-create the exact formula that made her last record such an invigorating listen. That doesn't mean "25" is a disappointment, at least when compared to the other pop albums of 2015 that failed to live up to their potential, but it's not a rousing triumph either. And Adele is just fine with that: she coos and wails at will, gives safely written pop from Ryan Tedder and Greg Kurstin much needed personality, and eventually succumbs to writing a song about her son ("Sweetest Devotion", the closest this album gets to matching the quality of "Hello"). Basically, if "21" was Adele's "Thriller", then "25" is her spiritual successor to "Bad": a record that shows an artist becoming a standard-bearer instead of a game-changer. True, Adele was the one who reset the pop standard, but there's an undercurrent of dissatisfaction that runs beneath "25" when taken into consideration that she could have taken her music to new and more unpredictable places, but deliberately chose not to. If that makes this record an unsuccessful sequel to "21", then so be it: it still does justice to Adele's skills as vocalist and cements her superiority among the many British balladeers in the 2010s. Now that she's a star, she's entitled to remind her wannabe peers (ahem, Sam Smith) who does it best.
Recommended Tracks in Bold:
1. Hello 2. Send My Love (To Your New Lover) 3. I Miss You
4. When We Were Young 5. Remedy 6. Water Under the Bridge
7. River Lea 8. Love in the Dark 9. Million Years Ago
10. All I Ask 11. Sweetest Devotion
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