25

25 is certainly the equal of its predecessor. What it sacrifices in youthful rawness it makes up in maturity and sheer class. Adele Adkins has taken her time over her third album and it shows.

Her music feels authentic because, as a listener, you believe that these songs about love, pain, fear, and loss come from somewhere real and personal. On 25, she once again has something to say, with a voice that demands to be heard.

A record that feels both new and familiar--a beautiful if safe collection of panoramic ballads and prettily executed detours.... Her voice is a national monument, a ninth wonder; whatever she chooses to wrap it around is transformed and taken over.

Through 11 effortlessly sophisticated and deeply-layered torch songs, Adele's powerful vocals glide between thunderous roars and rib-cracking falsettos over large dramatic piano swells to fuzzy, warm lower-register rumblings. Ballads are bold and demanding.

If there are no uptempo blazers on the order of "Rolling in the Deep" or "Rumor Has It," the album doesn’t suffer in quality for the lack.

Closure in many ways is the ultimate desire, and 25 is rife with it.

Throughout these towering production flourishes, Adele's vocals cast an even vaster shadow: swooping, swerving, blaring brassily and cooing tenderly, a full orchestra unto itself that's theatrical, unpredictable, and dynamic.

Even as she's suffering the romantic disadvantage, Adele infuses the songs of 25 with a love-drunk cockiness, tossing wine by a loose wrist as she reconsiders these departed men.

Adele’s fans have been waiting for years for new Adele songs to explain their experiences to them. And they get a worthy batch on 25, an album so full of heavy-duty drama that it makes a more lighthearted peer such as Katy Perry seem like a Pez dispenser.

And yet: that voice. On 25, the material is occasionally inspired, sometimes dull, but always serviceable--and with Adele, that’s enough.

The album’s OTT closer “Sweetest Devotion” doesn’t really provide the conclusion you want either. Despite that, there’s a very good record in here, propped up by a some incredible modern classics (“Hello”, “Remedy”, “When Were Young”, “Love in the Dark”).

25 is not a bad album, nor is it an excellent one--it’s just good, that’s all.

By broadening the themes, growing up a bit, and going deeper, 25 hits upon some truly transcendent moments—moments that deserve the millions of lives they'll soundtrack. It's just hard to fully praise an album that stops feeling like an album three-quarters of the way through.

25 doesn’t necessarily meet the fire of its predecessor, but it meets its mark--a whole different undertaking when tasked from the top.

It’s not so much that Adele’s lyrics are platitudinous (although they often are), it’s that the album’s prevailing sentiment eventually becomes wearying.... But regardless of how one might feel about the spiritual utility of pop music, Adele’s instincts as a singer remain unmatched; she is, inarguably, the greatest vocalist of her generation, an artist who instinctively understands timbre and pitch, when to let some air in.

Singles "Hello" and "When We Were Young" remain highlights on the record, but aforementioned tracks like "Send My Love (To Your New Lover)," "I Miss You" and "Water Under the Bridge," not to mention "River Lea," hear Adele taking a welcome detour from the orchestral piano-pop formula and moving towards more interesting, groove-driven patterns.

Make no mistake, all 11 songs are of a piece -- they're shaded by melancholy, gaining most of their power through performance -- but that cohesive sound only accentuates how Adele has definitively claimed this arena of dignified heartbreak as her own.

25 can seem like 11 singles instead of an album at times; all the big-name producers and co-songwriters muscling their way in doesn’t allow for too much restraint.

These are mostly decent songs but the lyrical landscape feels wearily well-trodden and it’s hard not to just want a bit more from an artist with the freedom to risk anything.

Adele is a singular talent, and the moments of brilliance are well worth wading through the few flashes of average.

25 manages to sound all of a piece, even as the songs veer from phenomenal to tepid. In places, everything comes together.

She sprinkles just enough specifics amid the cliches to identify the songs as her story, rather than a cut-and-paste factory job assembled by a committee of songwriters. But the music itself sticks to a formula centered on piano ballads and churchy hymns.

Even as she fulfils the brief here--not disappointing, revealing how fame heals some things, but not others--you want to wrench the woman away from the ivories and order her a jug of margarita.

Despite coming from the same body that houses a personality so unbelievably erratic and off-the-wall in the best possible way, 25 is as straight-down-the-line ‘Adele album’ as it gets.

25 is very much Adele playing safe.

When it works best, as on the now globally ubiquitous “Hello” or the show-stopping “All I Ask” (featuring a rending, diva-appropriate performance for the ages), 25 delivers the kind of timeless vibes people have come to expect from Adele, even though the first-person narratives in her songs often still feel oddly generic.

Never one for youthful giddiness, her third album is strikingly authoritative, tending towards the imperious even when expressing vulnerability yet rarely coming over as soullessly efficient.

The songs are invariably beautifully delivered--in a world of singers who feel impelled to express emotion by vocally doing their nut, Adele understands that less is usually more--but something is missing from them.

25 is, like its predecessor, weighed down by its soggy, vanilla ballads, few of which manage to escape their '70s- and '80s-indebted singer-songwriter schmaltz the way “Hello” (just barely) does.

You just can’t shake the feeling that the whole thing is just far too safe. You can’t blame team Adele for following a formula that has so far resulted in 30 million album sales--but here’s to a little more innovation on ‘29’.

There are isolated moments of musical intrigue scattered here and there through the album.... But as 25 continues, it’s gradually swamped by the kind of dreary piano ballads that are Adele’s fall-back position.

You'd think that with the weight of success behind her, Adele could, and would want to, do anything. Instead, she largely retreads the same paths and explores the same tones.

The songs are not so much about love as the memory of love and, accordingly, there's a chasm between her aggressive vocal runs and the cautiously generalist lyrics, especially on the maudlin latter half.