There’s something curiously irrelevant about reviewing Adele’s third studio album. The astonishing sales of its first single, Hello, suggest that global success on a scale unseen since the last time Adele released an album is already a foregone conclusion. The public seems even less interested in critical opinion than usual, if such a thing is possible. It has already been taken as read that 25 is a masterpiece: its quality isn’t up for question.
Certainly, no one who buys it is going to angrily return it to the shop because it wasn’t what they expected. For the most part, 25 sticks close to the formula of the best-known tracks on its predecessor, 21: big, piano-led ballads, decorated with strings and brass, dealing with heartbreak. In fact, most of them seem to deal with exactly the same heartbreak that fuelled 21: five years on, Adele is still, metaphorically speaking, planted on her ex’s lawn at 3am, tearfully lobbing her shoes at his bedroom window.
You can see why this has happened. 21’s vast success was at least partially predicated on the personal nature of the songwriting, but the things that have happened in Adele’s personal life since its release – vast fame and its attendant pressures, domestic contentment and motherhood – are difficult topics to write about without sounding ungrateful or trite respectively. That said, she occasionally gives it a go: Remedy offers a bit of Fix You-style sentimentality, and Million Years Ago rather affectingly depicts old friends who now “can’t look me in the eye, it’s like they’re scared of me”.
But the fact that she often ends up addressing a topic that has already been fairly thoroughly addressed is a problem. The songs are invariably beautifully delivered – in a world of singers who feel impelled to express emotion by vocally doing their nut, Adele understands that less is usually more – but something is missing from them. The raw emotional edge that was part of 21’s appeal is noticeable by its absence, replaced by what sounds less like closure and reconciliation than a certain pass-aggy bent: “Send my love to your new lover,” she sings brightly, “I hope you treat her better.” In fact, it’s hard not to start feeling your sympathy shift a little from the dumpee to the dumper. “When I call you never seem to be home,” she protests on Hello, which does rather make you think: well, you have just sold 30m copies of an album largely concerned with telling the world what a terrible shit he is. He’s probably trying to keep a fairly low profile.
There’s an argument that 25 bears comparison to the work of John Grant, another confessional singer-songwriter who has thus far wrung two hugely acclaimed albums of material out of a single failed relationship. The big difference is that there’s none of Grant’s blackly comic laughter here, none of his leavening self-deprecating humour. Grant is always tipping you the wink that he knows he’s going on a bit; Adele, on the other hand, just seems to be going on a bit. “This is never ending, we’ve been here before,” she sings on Love in the Dark. You can say that again.
In fairness, the feeling that you’re heading once more down a very well-trodden path matters less when the music really clicks: Hello is a pretty bulletproof bit of songwriting, and All I Ask sounds appealingly like the showstopping ballad from a hugely successful Broadway musical. Often, though, it slinks unremarkably into the middle of the road. They’re not bad songs as such, but they feel slightly ordinary, distinguished only by her voice, a state of affairs compounded by the fact that the much of the album proceeds at the same, fairly glacial pace.
The biggest disappointment turns out to be the album’s most anticipated collaboration, When We Were Young, co-authoured by lauded Canadian songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr. It should have been intriguing to hear his obsession with music made in mid-70s California – Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, the Lennon of Walls and Bridges – rubbing up against Adele’s crowd-pleasing songwriting approach, but somehow they have contrived to come up with a song that sounds like something Jimmy Young might have played on Radio 2 in 1978. Clearly no one buys an Adele album expecting bleeding-edge sonic innovation, in much the same way that no one buys a Sleaford Mods album in the hope of finding a tear-jerking ballad suitable for performing at The X Factor final, but the feeling that it doesn’t all have to be quite as rounded-edged as this is hard to shake.
By contrast, 25’s best moments come when someone pushes Adele – or Adele pushes herself – beyond just recreating former glories. Set to a finger-picked acoustic guitar, Million Years Ago is audibly influenced by French chanson, its lovely melody recalling in equal parts Charles Aznavour’s Hier Encore and the old Theme from Mash, Suicide Is Painless. Her two collaborations with longstanding producer Paul Epworth are great, particularly I Miss You, which is wreathed in ghostly backing vocals, tumbling drums and time-stretched, vaguely dubstepish vocal samples. Likewise the Danger Mouse-helmed River Lea – the closest thing the album comes to its predecessor’s Rolling in the Deep – its organ-led, faintly gospel-like mood given a tiny hint of strangeness by the producer’s liberal application of echo.
It’s an album that could have done with more stuff like that: more variety, more sense of an artist using the space and freedom that shifting 30m units buys you to move on, at least a little. As it is, 25’s big issue is that, in every sense, it dwells a little too heavily on the past.
