Adele's New Album "30" Has Arrived And It's Tremendous
Billboard - Adele didn’t go easy on us when she released her highly anticipated, heartfelt fourth studio album 30 on Friday (Nov. 19), via Melted Stone and Columbia Records.
Throughout the 12-track album, the queen of heartbreak anthems licks the wounds from her divorce with ex-husband Simon Konecki, salvages herself with copious amounts of wine, and holds onto the one thing she’ll never lose: herself.
Lead single “Easy on Me” has spent the last four consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, Billboard Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts. Adele performed “Easy on Me” and three more songs from 30 — “I Drink Wine,” “Hold On” and “Love is a Game” — during her CBS primetime television special Adele: One Night Only, which averaged 9.92 million viewers, per time-zone-adjusted fast national ratings from Nielsen.
30 is the long-awaited follow-up to 2015’s 25, which had a record-smashing first week after selling 3.38 million copies in its debut week in the U.S.
That was the biggest sales week of an album since Nielsen began tracking point-of-sale music purchases in 1991. 25 spent 10 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and won Grammy Awards for album of the year and best pop vocal album of the year.
Adele is a bad bitch.
She's dropped a ton of lb's. She's dating super-agent Rich Paul. And she's got the world orgasming over her new album that dropped less than 12 hours ago.
Look at these reviews -
The New York Times: ” … Adele’s songs present her as her own target and her own unfinished self-improvement project. The album’s core style is secular gospel, with Adele’s voice gathering itself over hymnlike piano chords, seeking faith not in a higher power but in herself.”
The Guardian: “Producing an album that’s different from its predecessors, without being different enough to scare anyone off, is a not-unimpressive feat, particularly under the circumstances. Given their sales figures, you couldn’t blame Adele for declining to even tinker with a formula that clearly ain’t broke.”
The Independent: “Adele has always been forthright – every bad feeling you’ve felt, she has confessed to feeling too – but there is a new immediacy here. Earlier songs spoke in platitudes and broad strokes. … She takes a different approach to fellow expert of heartache Taylor Swift who instead wraps real-life details such as a ‘red scarf’ around her songs like a bow in a gift to her fans – but the effect on the listener is the same: emotional connection. And then devastation.”
The Telegraph: “Grappling with guilt, shame and insecurity over her recent divorce yet infused with a life-affirming sense of liberation, self-forgiveness and burgeoning new romance, Adele Adkins has made what might just be the most potent everywoman album since Carole King’s 1971 classic Tapestry. Or at least since Adele’s own 2011 world-beating classic, 21.”
Imagine people, and publications, full of nerdy fucking writers, that were never good at anything besides putting words together to form eloquent sentences, who all just love to tear everybody down and rip things to shreds fawning over you like this?
Good for you Adele. You go Adele!
That's just the beginning-
Rolling Stone: “Adele has never sounded more ferocious than she does on 30—more alive to her own feelings, more virtuosic at shaping them into songs in the key of her own damn life. It’s her toughest, most powerful album yet.”
USA Today: “After more than a decade in the limelight, Adele songs have become as synonymous with heartbreak as ice cream and rom-coms. But as she wisely demonstrates on 30, it’s never too late to switch things up and fall in love with yourself for a change.”
NPR: “30, on the other hand, engages with the world — through lyrics that trade adolescent romanticism for genuine self-examination, arrangements that reflect the present moment, and a vocal presence as warm and multifaceted as Adele is in interviews and her onstage patter, where she’s a pal who tells long stories and makes jokes, not a gravitational force.”
Los Angeles Times: “‘To Be Loved’ — the next-to-last cut on the 12-track 30, due Friday — climaxes with what can only be described as a howl of pain, Adele’s famous God-given instrument so volcanic that it’s hard to believe everybody in Los Angeles didn’t stop on the day she recorded it and wonder what they just heard.”
Variety: “… Although 30 is at times the rawest and most sobering of the records she’s made to date, it also manages conversely to be the most fun, in its emotionally rattling fashion, as Adele mixes it up with an array of producers and stylistic pastiches to arrive at something that has a sense of play to go with all the sadness and self-laceration. It’s a kick in the pants as well as a solid cry. And the fact that it feels a little messier than her other albums is all the more fitting for a trip through a divorce court of the mind.”
I listened to the album this morning on my morning jog and was pretty blown away. That doesn't usually happen lately on my first listen of a new album. I didn't know if it was the endorphins or if it was actually that good, so I looked up to see what everybody else thought about it.
Usually, when I see everybody in the media gushing or bashing I tend to consciously or subconsciously sway the other way.
But not the case with this record. They're all correct in their takes.
And after watching her special with Oprah earlier this week, I will admit, I really wanted to hate this album. The special was a Hollywood circle jerk featuring all the usual suspects in the crowd sucking each other off and yucking it up for the camera. Ooo'ing and aaah'ing for the camera the best they could. (The same people who probably shamed her for losing all that weight.) Seeing somebody like Adele, who 10 years ago was terrified of being in the public spotlight, and of celebrity, be front and center for that was a jaw-dropper. But that's just me being a hater.
But hate on 30, I cannot. Adele sounds amazing as always vocally on this, but the material is different. The range is crazy. We've got country, R&B, pop and ballad songs on 30.
It's not the usual heartbreak album. It's more a celebration of life, and its ups and downs. Self-improvement, accountability, disbelief, acceptance, guilt, hope, maturity, vulnerability, and finding new love.
I think the back-to-back tracks "My Little Love” and “Cry Your Heart Out", and "To Be Loved", are the standouts for me so far.
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My ONLY complaint about it is that they teased us with the tracklist showing a version of "Easy On Me" featuring Chris Stapleton that got us all rock hard for, but it's sadly not on the album. Stop fucking with us Columbia.
Give it a listen below and be sure to let me know how shitty my taste in music is because I don't blog about GWAR or George Strait.