Adele

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Adele

Adele "21" album

- Release date : January 2011 -

21 is the second album by English singer-songwriter Adele, released on January 24th, 2011. The album was largely produced by Red Hot Chilli Peppers collaborator Rick Rubin in Dublin, Ireland and Florence and the Machine cohort Paul Epworth in Kensal Rise, London.

Speaking to Digital Spy, Adele explained the background behind the album, "It's different from 19 — it's about the same things but in a different light," she explained in a press release. "I deal with things differently now. I'm more patient, more honest, more forgiving and more aware of my own flaws, habits and principles - something that comes with age I think."

"21" album tracks and lyrics

"21" album reviews

One of the few real beneficiaries of The X Factor effect – her version of Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love has been darting about the top 40 since the audition rounds, showing more staying power than poor Joe McElderry’s last two singles combined – Adele’s stock has risen significantly since becoming the first recipient of the Brits Critics’ Choice award. Since then she’s picked up Grammys and broken the States as a bonus, so the pressure was clearly on for her next move to deliver big. And, oh my, with 21 doesn’t she just.

The last few years have seen those who started strongly become mightily unstuck on their sophomore efforts. For every Lily Allen there’s been a Kate Nash or a Duffy – the latter’s comeback, Endlessly, seems to have fallen on significantly fewer ears than the 2.8 million who liked her debut – so it’s a treat to hear that no such problems beset 21. It really is so marvellous, you’re almost compelled to stand up and applaud it after the first listen.

With a top-notch production team behind the album, including Rick Rubin and Paul Epworth, every track is a highlight. Current single, Rolling in the Deep, is a modern soul stomper about an errant ex; the literally banging Rumour Has It channels the avenging rock‘n’roll soul of Wanda Jackson; there’s a fine, mellow, acoustic bossa nova-y take on The Cure’s Lovesong. Don’t You Remember is a classically styled ballad, which feels like the sort of tune you’ve known all your life – many are certain to bawl along to it the next time their hearts are broken; and the blues-bruised I’ll Be Waiting could’ve come from any Willie Mitchell-produced southern soul session. Final track Someone Like You, just voice and piano, is an actual thing of beauty, placing the listener in one of those moments where you feel you’re in the presence of a future standard. You can imagine it being both honked through by talent show contestants and transcended by veterans alike.

21 is simply stunning. After only a handful of plays, it feels like you’ve always known it. It will see Adele become an even greater award magnet come the end of the year, leaving her contemporaries for dust. Genuinely brilliant.

*** by Ian Wade, BBC Music ***

Two years (and a bit) on from 19, Adele Adkins comes of age sounding as wise beyond her years as she did in 2008. While 19 detailed the end of a relationship with "an idiot", 21 is about the end of something great. There's cheating, jealously, joy and heartbreak contained within; all stripped into shape by a galactico squad sheet of producers – starting with Rick Rubin and Ryan Tedder and working down to current British studio darlings Paul Epworth and Fraser T Smith. But it's former Semisonic man Dan Wilson who is responsible for the album's highlight, the gorgeous Someone Like You, certain to be coming soon to a montage near you. The tale of Adkins facing up to the end of a love – "never mind, I'll find someone like you" – is half heart-wrenching, half uplifting. It's nearly good enough reason to break up with someone, simply so you can mope in it. Other moments of note come in a Sufjanesque takedown of the Cure's Lovesong; the single Rolling in the Deep (inspired by a Nashville-schooled US tourbus driver) and the immediately familiar, Dusty-does-Dulwich sound of I'll Be Waiting. A progressive, grown-up second collection, it ought to ensure Adele is around for 23, 25, 27 and beyond.

*** by Will Dean, The Guardian ***

What a difference two years make. When Brit school graduate Adele Atkins released her debut album 19 (her age at the time), she seemed, along with the likes of Lily Allen and Kate Nash, part of a stampede of sparky young London singers who followed in the wake of Amy Winehouse.

While 19 went to number one and she picked up the inaugural Critics’ Choice Brit award, what distinguished Adele from the similarly retro-voiced Duffy was the name she made for herself across the Atlantic, where she won two Grammys and influential fans such as Bob Dylan and Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

It is that American success that has shaped Atkins’s follow-up album. It’s steeped in Southern blues, country and soul. In another singer’s hands this might seem a nakedly ambitious attempt to appeal to the American charts, but Atkins makes the material sound genuine, largely because it is perfect for her. Where previously her slight, observational songs seemed barely able to carry her powerful voice, the emotional and musical heft of these styles enables her to really spread her vocal wings.

And her voice is a thing of wonder. There is warmth, power and vulnerability, sometimes in the same note. She has less of the unpredictable edge of Amy Winehouse, or the am-dram cool of Florence Welch, but she has a far greater range and subtlety than either, and hers is a voice that seems to go right to your heart.

Producers Rick Rubin and Paul Epworth have done the right thing by foregrounding that and leaving the musical background solid and unshowy. Whether she can sell American country sounds to a British audience remains to be seen, but avoiding the dancefloor pyrotechnics that so many singers are drawn to at the moment is a wise move — on this album she out-divas them all.

*** by Bernadette McNulty, The Telegraph ***