Member Since: 10/31/2011
Posts: 16,937
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The year’s biggest album reprises the themes of its predecessor – there’s no sign of Adele using her commercial clout to buy herself room for adventure
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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.
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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.
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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.
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