Let's rewind back to 2011. We were knee deep in a pop chart landscape dominated by club music. Around this time period, it was easy to indicate how stupid pop music was getting with the rise of anything that just screamed let's party, catchy enough production, and autotune. It led to some of the stupidest songs becoming number one hits.
That's when 2011 brought us a breath of fresh air in Adele. Listening to someone with a powerful voice talk about actual human emotions made us vulnerable and Adele single handedly became one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. One of the best selling albums of all time, multiple Grammys, multiple number one hits. Adele literally set fire to the rain of the pop music industry. Then she disappeared...and the pop music landscape changed. Don't get me wrong, the club music is still around but the pop landscape is far more serious than it was five years ago. We have Lady Gaga doing duets with Tony Bennett, Wiz Khalifa doing tribute ballads, just far more slow to mid tempo hit songs and it makes me kinda miss the stupidity of the late 2000s/early 2010s to be honest. I'm not saying that I hate this new serious phase pop music, but I much prefer to listen to Lady Gaga's nonsense syllables than her sing about domestic assault
...I still can't believe she tried to release that as a radio single.
But what does this have to do with Adele? Well I started to witness this change in the pop music climate shortly after Adele dominated it four years ago. While she isn't the sole proprietor of this change, it has her finger prints because don't sit here and tell me that Sam Smith would have became as big by his own merits or that Sia wouldn't have become far more mainstream. It's because someone needed to fill the soulful pop void that Adele made so popular that we got so many artists that we didn't know what to do with.
So enough prologue, how do I feel about Adele? Well...I don't love Adele as much as everyone else around me seems to. I mean I have always liked her, but I don't really love her. 21 was a really good album and Adele obliterated her ex to smithereens. But there was only so much piano ballads that I could take and you can notice a slight decline in the song quality until you get to the end where Someone Like You just made the decline worth it to get a song that powerful. I think Adele is an amazing vocalist, but there is the one thing I have never been fond of when it came to this soul pop genre. You can only take so much before every song just starts to sound the same that you can't really differentiate it.
That's why I was afraid when Adele said she was releasing her new album. I thought to myself do we really need a new Adele album at this point and time when we have so many other soul pop artists doing the same thing she does? I mean yeah she was a breath of fresh air but will she still be? Then I read Adele was trying to go in a different direction with 25 in comparison to 19 and 21. That put some cautious optimism into my mind because let's face it. We all evolve the older we get and that's especially true when it comes to the music industry. Artists need to evolve otherwise they can get left in the dust if they don't adapt to the climate change or try to set the new standard.
Does Hello do that? I'll let you listen and be the judge. Because I don't hear an artist setting the new standard. I hear Adele still doing what she did off of 21. Talking about how she was sorry for breaking this guy's heart. Adele, didn't you just do this song four years ago in Someone Like You? This doesn't sound like an artist going in a new direction. It’s the sound of someone understandably declining to fix something that wasn’t broken. Hello could have been on 21, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about its sound and its quality. It’s the kind of lovelorn epic ballad that made Adele one of the biggest stars in the world.
That being said, Adele's talent is on full display here as she has one of the best voices in the world and sells the hell out of this song. It's easy to see why she is one of the biggest stars in the world when even a song as middle of the road as this, can tug at your emotions as well as Adele does. Like I couldn't picture Sam Smith being able to make an emotional connection to this like Adele does. If anything, it's Adele being able to shower her raw power all over this that saves this for me. It shows how much better she is than the sea of soul pop singers we have in 2015.
Otherwise, this song is just a disappointment and is only ok in my eyes. Keep in mind that Adele chose this as her lead radio single for 25. This is the song she chose to make her listeners hyped for her new album this month. If you are giving your fan base more of the same from 21, then how is that an introduction to the new you? Maybe it's just me expecting more from Adele than just doing what she did previously and automatically getting a number one hit. But if you are expecting me to think 25 will be as groundbreaking as 21 was to the pop culture landscape, this single did not do it for me. It's just longing for me to find someone else to come breathe some fresh air into this stagnant landscape that is pop music.
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