Adele: Easy on Me review – reliably, relatably Adele-esque
Adele’s statement announcing the release of her fourth album was published on social media earlier this week. In it, the singer doesn’t talk much about music, more about her emotional state during the album’s making, provoked, one assumes, by the breakdown of her marriage: “absolute mess and inner turmoil … consumed by grief”. She compared the album she made amid it to friends coming over with “a bottle of wine and a takeaway” and offering earthy, if astrologically based, advice: “It’s your Saturn return, babes, fuck it.”
It all sounds thoroughly grim, but it also has a hint of reassurance about it for her fans, who come to Adele in record-breaking numbers for relatable heartbreak – the musical equivalent of an old friend in the pub, tearfully relating the latest chapter in their reliably disastrous love life as they demolish a third glass of pinot grigio. For one thing, it underlines that she has fresh heartbreak to write about, which had been an issue with her last album, 25, on which she was forced to rake over the same relationship that had inspired its predecessor for material. For another, her fans might have cause to be alarmed by what the cover of Vogue refers to as “a new look, a new love, a new sound”. How reliably relatable can Adele now be, with her home in LA, her squad of Hollywood A-list pals, her three-times-a-day exercise regime and, the Vogue profile suggests, an employee on hand with a different pair of shoes should the singer want to change out of her heels? It’s a statement that, consciously or otherwise, sends out a message: “Business as usual babes, fuck it.”
It’s the same message sent out by Easy on Me, a single so Adele-esque it’s quite hard to make a qualitative judgment about: you hear it and think “yes, that’s definitely Adele, doing the stuff that Adele does” and adjust your response according to whether or not The Stuff That Adele Does is your idea of musical nirvana.
It offers mournful piano that gradually becomes more strident as the song progresses – suggesting a hint of cathartic empowerment about sharing your misery – gently supported by subtle touches of bass: the figure it plays during the verses has a vague hint of the opening to the old theme from Hill Street Blues about it. Her voice, as powerful as ever, sounds initially wounded, then soars. Even if you find The Stuff That Adele Does miserable, you’d have your work cut out arguing that her vocal during the final bridge is anything other than fantastic. The lyrics – as on Someone Like You, or Hello, or Send My Love (To Your New Lover) – address the other party in a failing relationship, asking for forgiveness and understanding while underlining that it isn’t really her fault – “you can’t deny how hard I’ve tried, I changed who I was to put you both first – but now I give up” – which has a realistic tang: it’s very much an emotional note people strike when they’re tearfully offloading their woes three glasses of pinot grigio to the good.
Unlike Someone Like You, it’s not the kind of Adele song built to stop the listener in their tracks, but, unlike the lesser moments of 25, nor is it the kind of Adele song that just goes in one ear and out the other. It’s reliably relatable business as usual, which – one suspects – is exactly what the millions of people who buy Adele’s albums want, especially at this particular juncture in history.
