Grade: C
The problem I have is that I thought she was pretty awful before — when she was just fat and from Tottenham. Now that she has been marinated in SoCal for six years, she seems to have become even worse: a kind of Meghan Markle with a larynx. It was cheap schlock all the way back then; it’s expensive schlock now — that’s the only difference.
This is her divorce album, her ‘Hollywood’ album, her mature album, her BRAVE album according to her adoring… critics is obviously the wrong word. OK, it starts off with words — ‘I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart’ — on the song ‘Strangers By Nature’. If that doesn’t make you blush embarrassedly for her, then what will?
That song, much as one or two others, is Adele pretending she is Nat King Cole and consequently we are intermittently euthanised by cocktail piano and eminently predictable faux-jazz chord changes.
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