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At 19 years of age, Adele Adkins achieved what many artists spend a lifetime striving for, receiving a BRIT and two Grammies, not to mention a Mercury Prize nomination, for debut album 19. But at the age of 21, it feels as though she's aged at least a decade with second album 21. Beginning strong with the one-two punch of gospel heart-bleeder "Rolling in the Deep" and the swampy blues stomp of "Rumour Has It," Adele emanates the kind of ass-kicking sass you'd expect from a diva twice her age. But 21 runs into a wall soon after, with the Londoner failing to keep the...Read More

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Throughout 21, the sequel to her smash debut 19, Adele Adkins comes armed with a who's who of producers and songwriting collaborators, spending much of an undoubtedly extensive recording budget on carefully crafting songs that lash out at a former lover with righteous fury. "You're gonna wish you never had met me," a chorus of overdubbed Adeles warn on the gospel hoedown "Rolling in the Deep." Yet on the piano-led finale, she vows, "I'll find someone like you," as if that's progress. It's a statement that's utterly WTF and yet true to the cyclical nature of psychological damage.

As her album titles announce, Adkins is barely an adult. And just as an appetite for self-destruction became a selling point for the Seattle grunge sound, the romantic volatility of youthful femininity colors Britain's retro soul birds. Even while working with quintessential American mainstreamer Rick Rubin, Adkins sounds on the verge of tabloid implosion.

Though the undeniable lament "Chasing Pavements" earned a 2009 Grammy, 19 was bogged down by too many folky guitar ballads. Those have vanished; ditto Adkins' Tottenham accent. Instead, she wails harder and writes bolder, piling on the dramatic production flourishes to suggest a lover's apocalypse. If you're looking for a record that'll make you wanna trash your beloved's belongings and have make-up sex amid the ruins, 21's your jam.

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Here's how Adele opens this particular heartbreak adagio: "I heard that you're settled down, that you found a girl and you're married now." It gets worse from there. The slow, mournful piano figure underneath the track never changes or quickens or flattens out, but it's all the company Adele gets here; no other instruments show up on the song. So the piano is the quiet little skeleton that turns out to be all the song needs. With it, we get Adele's furious tornado of a voice, an instrument that here, heard in its undiluted form, absolutely blasts away the Amy Winehouse comparisons that, early in Adele's career, came too often.

And once you get past the insane power of that voice, there's still more meat there. Because as theatrically heartbroken as Adele sounds on this song, the lyrics still offer the sense that we're dealing with mature adult emotions here; it's not a woe-is-me tantrum. Throughout, she also wishes her ex well, calling him "old friend" and never demanding to know what the new girl has that she didn't. She doesn't have to ask; the question hangs there in the air anyway. She's got her face forward, or anyway she puts on a good show of it: "Never mind, I'll find someone like you"-- like she can will a better reality into being just by wailing it. Sometimes, pop music can still break your heart.

[from 21; out February 22 on XL/Columbia]

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Flattening all memory of her debut

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01/01/2011
$11.99

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Adele has finally wrapped up her second album – and the first song to come out is frankly awesome. At first she was unfairly characterised both as part of the crew hanging on to Amy Winehouse’s coat tails and that group swimming in Lily Allen’s slipstream. Still two Grammy Awards marked her out as more [...]

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