Adele - 30 (1 Viewer)

Pingu said:
I know that Adele is Adele and everything, but it’s just mildly frustrating that she has the voice, the personality, the music taste, the popularity and the credibility to release basically whatever kind of music she wants, so it would be nice for her to throw a bit of a curveball for once.
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I agree but equally predictability has her virtues and it’s sometimes good to know what you’re almost certainly getting. Not that I personally want to get it in this case but GENERALLY SPEAKING
 
Also better that she stick with the formula than start wheeling in Cardy Bee OR THE LIKE for songs about her minge :)
 
I’m just glad that Twitter and Facebook hasn't resorted to any sort of hyperbole
 
Christmas period sales this year will presumably obliterate last year's all time low then
 
What’s Taylor releasing?

I thought she was still winging through her back cat
 
How have Swift's previous new versions done first week sales wise in the UK? Is she a lock for #1?

Not that I think Abba will get two weeks - if they get the first I don't see them holding off Sheeran in his 3rd week in their second, after their physicals collapse.
 
funky said:
Oh. Boring.

We need more contenders! Christmas album Battle Royale!
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The OCC posted this, presumably before Taylor shit her pants.

October 29​

Ed Sheeran - =

Spice Girls - Spice (25th Anniversary Edition)

Tori Amos - Ocean To Ocean

November 5​

ABBA - Voyage

Diana Ross - Thank You

James Arthur - It'll All Make Sense In The End

November 12​

Courtney Barnett - Things Take Time, Take Time

Idles - Crawler

Little Mix - Between Us

Michael Buble - Christmas (10th Anniversary Edition)

Rod Stewart - Tears of Hercules

The Wanted - Most Wanted: Greatest Hits

November 19​

Elbow - Flying Dream 1

Jame Blunt - The Stars Beneath My Feet (2004 - 2021)

Matt Goss - The Beautiful Unknown

Robert Plant & Alison Krauss - Raise The Roof

Sting - The Bridge

Taylor Swift - Red (Taylor's Version)
 
Rod Stewart's last album had 3 weeks at #1 before Christmas in 2019, so it will be interesting to see how he does this time. That was one of those greatest hits with the RPO affairs, whereas his new one is a mixture of new tracks and covers I believe.
 
Pipo said:
Fuck Ed Sheeran for not letting the Spices have a go at #1 for at least a week :evil:
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I’m not sure if you are being sarcastic but they have no chance of doing anything really, do they?
 
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Why do Ed Sheeran's album titles fill me with such IRRATIONAL RAGE?

Is it simply because they're UNSPEAKABLY SHIT or is there possibly a further, unexplored reason?
 
Pipo said:
If The Sugababes one can go Top 20, surely they have a possibility of Top 10? :confused: I don't know how these re-releases work nowadays.
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I think it should go top 10 easily. I could never have seen it going to number 1 though, Sheeran or not.
 
The "Spice" reissues are far too expensive to chart highly. If the 2CD had been in a digipak at £12, maybe but not at £30.
 
What on earth is James Arthur doing still releasing music?

But damn that's gonna be a busy holiday season.
 
leaning more toward AMERICAN VOGUE for this one and also wishing she covered VOGUE ITALIA so we could see her living la dolce vita in DONATELLA'S FINEST TRASH COUTURE :disco:
 
long descriptions of the music from both Vogues :o

She also started going to the studio. She wrote a song for Angelo the day after he told her he couldn’t see her. Over time, the album became a way of explaining things to him—something for him to listen to when he’s older. “He has so many simple questions for me that I can’t answer, because I don’t know the answer. Like, Why can’t we still live together? That’s just not what people do when they get divorced. But why not? I’m like, I don’t fucking know. That’s not what society does.And: Why don’t you love my dad anymore?And I’d be like, I do love your dad. I’m just not in love. I can’t make that make sense to a nine-year-old.”

For this and other reasons, the new album is different from her previous albums. “I realized that I was the problem,” Adele says. “Cause all the other albums are like, You did this! You did that! Fuck you! Why can’t you arrive for me? Then I was like: Oh, shit, I’m the running theme, actually. Maybe it’s me!”
I ask if she revisited any iconic divorce albums in the process of writing hers—I am thinking of Sinéad O’Connor’s I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got—and Adele responds that she didn’t know she was making a divorce album. She’s not sure it is one, in fact. “He’s not one of my exes. He’s the dad of my child.” If the new album is a divorce album, it’s a different kind of divorce album. “It was more me divorcing myself,” she says, exploding into a laugh that sounds like a balloon buzzing around a room as it deflates. “Just being like, Bitch, fuckin’ hot mess, get your fuckin’ shit together!”

“It’s sensitive for me, this record, just in how much I love it,” Adele adds. “I always say that 21 doesn’t belong to me anymore. Everyone else took it into their hearts so much. I’m not letting go of this one. This is my album. I want to share myself with everyone, but I don’t think I’ll ever let this one go.”

The first song she plays is the first song on the album, a gut-wrenching plea of a piano ballad, the chorus of which goes: “Go easy on me baby / I was still a child / Didn’t get the chance to / Feel the world around me.” Her voice does different impossible Adele-ish things with the refrain “go easy,” and although it starts to take on a euphoric tone, by the end, I feel pummeled. “So that’s that one,” she says quietly. “Do you like it?”

She queues up another one. “The next song is the one I wrote when I went to the studio the day after Angelo said I can’t see you.” A certain combination of elements—sexy ’70s groove, heavy strings, heavier lyrics—immediately calls to mind Marvin Gaye. (What’s Going On was a “very big reference” on the album, turns out.) “My little love,” Adele sings in a low, smoky register. “I see your eyes / Widen like an ocean / When you look at me / So full of my emotions.”

I’m not sure I will survive another of Adele’s new songs, but as she plays four more, it becomes clear that they are mapping a progression. The next one is cathartic, a soulful promise of new love that has her repeating variations of: “I just want to love you for free / Everybody wants something from me / You just want me.” The fourth song is downright upbeat, meant to be a laugh-while-you’re-crying respite from the heaviness—“Otherwise we’d all kill ourselves, wouldn’t we?” Then comes a joyous anthem. Over gospelly organ she sings: “Let time be patient / Let pain be gracious.” Toward the end a chorus of her friends chimes in, chant-singing, “Just hold on, just hold on,” over and over. “The thing that they’re all singing is what my friends used to say to me,” Adele explains. “That’s why I wanted them to sing it, rather than an actual choir.”

The last song she plays is the final song on the album. It was written and recorded while a TV in the studio played Breakfast at Tiffany’son mute, she explains. “As it finished, we were trying to work out how to end the song, and I said, We should write it as if we were writing the soundtrack—you know, at the end of the movie, where it pans out.” The arrangement is whimsical and wall-of-sound retro, full of strings and vibrato and midcentury romance, but the lyrics deliver a subversive twist. The first line: “All your expectations of my love are impossible.”

She wrote both the piano ballad and the song about Angelo with Greg Kurstin, with whom she wrote “Hello”. The friend-chorus song and the Breakfast at Tiffany’s song were written with Inflo, the producer from North London who works a lot with Danger Mouse. “He’s brutally honest with me, like no one else would dare,” Adele says of Inflo. “He’s sort of got this constant resting bitch face, really.” A handful of others worked on songs I didn’t hear: the Swedish pop wizards Max Martin and Shellback; the Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson; and the Canadian singer-songwriter Tobias Jesso Jr., on a “very powerful song” she describes as “an Édith Piaf-y moment.” As with her previous albums, the vocal tracks are original demos because, she explains, demos have a charisma and an urgency that get lost if you rerecord them. “I never redo my vocals. Never. Never ever.”
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Under the hot teatime sun, the first strains of a song she doesn’t yet want to reveal the name of hit my ears. A slow, meditative arrangement, then – pow! – that voice. “Go easy on me…” entreats the chorus, which sits between verses that recall her fraught childhood, her lost marriage and the lessons learnt and unlearnt about family, love and abandonment along the way. I’m not sure she’s ever been in finer voice. Sitting opposite me, she flits between nervously examining the horizon and shooting across smiles of such genuine warmth they catch you off guard. For the son of more than one divorce, suffice to say it’s pretty moving.

Yet the source material had already happened. “I assumed it would be about my divorce but it’s kind of not. Well,” she self-corrects, “that song obviously is.” (Over the course of our hours together, she will play me four more songs – they all sound pretty divorce-y to me.)

As we pull into the late-afternoon traffic, she hands me the AirPods again. “This is where we hit self-reflection.” The Hudson River is whizzing past the windows, while, nestled on the back seat, I am transported to an after-hours jazz bar as Adele’s voice quivers in my ears: “I know how low I can go.” Though the standout lyric has to be: “The road less travelled is a road best left behind.” “I love my lyrics on this record,” she says, her tone one of rare contentment.

Clearly, there has been a professional evolution to match the personal one. Musically, the range on the new album – from her usual singer-songwriter gear to midnight chanteuse to chilled Balearic club at sundown – has never been more eclectic. As ever, she is proud of the secrecy around it and her plans for its roll-out. “I think I’m actually one of the most punk artists around,” she says, a minxy glint in her eye. “My music, absolutely not. But the way I move is very punk.”

She gathered some of her closest collaborators: producer Greg Kurstin, who worked with her on 25; supreme pop hitmaker Max Martin; and her new favourite, Inflo, the London-based producer known for his work with Little Simz and Sault. She even pulled in Swedish composer and producer Ludwig Göransson, who won an Academy Award for his Black Panther score and has worked closely with Childish Gambino. Once again, however, for anyone out there waiting for that Beyoncé duet or Kendrick verse, there are no featured performers on the record. We may live in the era of the big-fish collaboration, but when you’re one of the biggest fish of all it seems it’s never quite worth it. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” she says, airily. “It’s not calculated. It’s just never been right for some reason.”

She plays me another mystery song. “Self-destruction,” she mouths, as the AirPods go in. Again, she won’t reveal the name, but it’s the most non-Adele sound yet – shades of Goldfrapp, her voice sampled and resampled over a hypnotic beat. It smells like a hit. “Oh, that is destruction,” she says.
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the final song is "seven minute campy jazz" :o

She wants to play me a last song, the seven-minute opus that concludes the new album. It’s a knockout. A string-swirling, Garland-invoking, jazzy, campy, swooning delight, packed with world-weary end-of-the-show reflection, and featuring a vocal for the ages.
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Adele and her PUNK MOVEMENTS :disco: :D

Those song descriptions do suggest some intriguing directions. I'm here for a dash of What's Going On and the Balearics at sundown.
 
My biggest take away from that is her son is nine years old?!?

I thought he’d be four at most
 
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