Sometimes I worry. Yeah. I do. About the future—all those Disney kids teeny bopping around, giggling toward adulthood with their goddamn pristine teeth. Don’t laugh.
But then an angel descends. A 22-year-old angel, with a voice so warm, so encompassing that you can nuzzle right up in its welcome embrace; she sings with such power, but her right arm only daintily speaks pinches and clasps, as if holding a wand with which she tears down the ugly outside world and resurrects in you a faith you forgot you had.
The angel with the wand, as you already knew, is Adele. She produces a quality of soul singing not found in most human figures today. Sometimes its sprinkled and others glazed with that Southern gospel choiring wholesomeness (despite her London origin). Suckle it up. Songs like the single “Rolling in the Deep,” revive your deadened mind, your eyes, and your ass; throw your nodding head down with some slant or shake it wistfully; put on your stomping boots, then curl your toes. Though you’ll have to strip those boots off for your finest church getup for when she sits you down in a pew on “Take it All” and “One and Only.”
Yeah, you do have to prefix her new album, 21, with “pop-.” And you can skip about a quarter ‘cause the songs just don’t beg her to pull you in tighter. But the rest is pure soul, as she constructs with her angelic powers a realm bound not to notes, but to feeling—not to cleanliness, but rawness. Sometimes a melodic gale scratches up her throat. At other times, she just juts her jaw, locks, and lets soul drizzle over the last syllables of a phrase. You see, she’s an angel not because of her aura or her power, but because she can corral imperfection and make it beautiful; her front-left tooth is chipped.
(Photo: Freshurbanent.com)
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