“I feel like my life is flashing by, and all I can do is watch and cry.If Adele could not sell more than a million albums in a single week, could any artist? That has always been a special feat, but at the peak of the CD market it happened with some regularity. Million Years Ago sounds like a French chanson, her voice finding a deeper place over plucked acoustic guitar. She sums it up best on the album’s other oddity. Adele says she would rather perform for free at a fan's birthday party.Forget her flip phone, it’s Adele’s faux-fur that we want.Adele pays tribute to victims of Paris attacks with moving performance.Contentment is nice, but it’s also the sound of a million closing doors. This time she’s longing for the options that are no longer open to her, mourning the loss of that period when you don’t know what you’ll do for a living, where you’ll settle, who your partner or children will be. She has since explained: “It’s about friends, ex-boyfriends, it’s about myself, it’s about my family.” The “other side” that she sings of is the place of contentment - solid relationship, motherhood, vast riches - in which she now exists.
When I wrote about Hello last month, I mistakenly suggested it was about the same old boyfriend in Someone Like You. Love in the Dark is drowning in strings, a song that’s a luxury item and will be too flashy for some. When We Were Young, written with little known pianist Tobias Jesso Jr, works as a nostalgic ballad without its long, slow build towards five minutes in length. She has a percussionist in her band now, a pop music status symbol. Recorded mostly in London, but also in Los Angeles, Stockholm and Prague, and mixed largely in New York, occasionally there’s a sense that someone has decided that 25 needs to sound expensive. Almost everything floats along atop blurry washes of female backing vocals. River Lea, made with more experimental producer Danger Mouse, features keyboard chords made from samples of her voice. There’s a cavernous Eighties thud to the dominant drums on I Miss You. The retro soul that earned early Amy Winehouse comparisons has evolved into a relatively more modern sound.
That’s not to say Adele hasn’t progressed, though.
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