It’s a kick in the pants as well as a solid cry. And although “30” is at times the rawest and most sobering of the records she’s made to date, it also manages conversely to be the most fun, in its emotionally rattling fashion, as Adele mixes it up with an array of producers and stylistic pastiches to arrive at something that has a sense of play to go with all the sadness and self-laceration. But there’s a bracing maturity in these 12 tracks that’s more emotionally complex and intriguing than the rather more easy-to-follow woe of the preceding three collections. That’s not to say “30” will be nearly the biggest seller of them all (it won’t) or that it has a string of obvious world-conquering singles embedded within it (although it has a good enough handful of un-obvious ones). With “30,” she’s zagged to a richer, more compelling collection that feels like her best. Her previous album, 2015’s “25,” took on the appearance of being that confessional, but she admitted in interviews that it didn’t really represent her then-reasonably-contented headspace … that she was relying on old heartaches for new material, so that the record kind of ended up being a “21 II.” With that water-treading sequel, she’d zigged to making the weakest of her four albums. But the real rebound, for now, is in Adele as an artist, and that has a lot to do with how ridiculously candid she’s getting, again, along with the increased quotient of musical chances she’s taking. Because, besides being that exhausting, it’s also that good.Ī few lighter-hearted songs in the middle of the album about moving on give us a hint of what Adele-on-the-rebound might be like. Rest assured, though, that there’s nothing casual about the way she treats the dissolution on “30,” an album that meets the breach with enough wrenching, life-and-death drama to leave you completely spent by the time its hour is up, then ready to immediately reinvest. These appearances all have her bringing up the fact that she instigated the split as casually as if she were discussing giving up aspartame for green tea. What’s very much done on “30” (which comes out Friday) is Adele’s marriage, as almost anyone sentient knows from the abundance of walk-up media, from twin global Vogue covers to an Oprah sit-down viewed in the U.S this week by nearly 10 million. Still, the antiquated coinage is sort of fitting anyway for an album that’s like a long exhalation that’s saying IT … IS … FINISHED, to borrow a favorite phrase of writers, messiahs and divorcees everywhere. That Adele has named her fourth album “30” is coincidence, since she draws her LP titles from her age when most of the songs were written. Back in the teletype days, “-30-” was the mark reporters used to denote the end of a story.
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