Gareth - 9/27/2011

With the multi million selling, global success of Adele's second album '21' her fist album may have been quickly forgotten and overlooked, but with its recent resurgence back into the top ten along side '21', maybe this is a good time to re visit and remind ourselves, just how good Adele's debut album was and is, and how relevant it still is. The debut album from Adele. A beautiful record, refreshing and an easily listenable journey. You put on one song and end up listening to the whole album every time.

The first song 'Daydreamer' is the voice of Adele and an acoustic guitar really draws you in with its stops and starts, where the guitar stops and only her vocal bridges the gap as the guitar comes in again, a lovely start to an album. The second song 'Best for Last', a great song with an even better and very memorable bass line that just sticks in your head. The third song and one of the big hits from the album 'Chasing Pavement', in my opinion one of the slightly weaker tunes, but with catchy piano riff and chorus along with the repetitive use of the chorus makes it perfect for radio play. The song 'Cold Shoulder', I believe to be one of the best songs on the album with some fast drumming and piano and a truly magnificent vocal. 'Crazy for you' and 'First love', like the first track, are real stripped backed numbers, with guitar and piano respectively, both beautiful. I would say that 'Melt My Heart to Stone' and 'My Same', are good songs but have to be pushed to the side, but only because of such a high standard on the album. The song 'Right as Rain' sounds as thought it should be a cover of a 70's style soul song, re worked and the Bob Dylan cover 'Make you Feel My Love' is jaw droppingly stunning, far more stunning than even the creator himself could ever have imagined it himself I am sure.

The deluxe edition of this album has a second cd, containing 10 live acoustic recordings, from the Hotel café in Los Angeles. A majority of the tracks are live versions of the songs taken from the '19' album, with 2 different songs being introduced which are 'That's It I Quite I'M Moving On', and an alternate version of the song Adele recorded with the Raconteurs 'Many Shades of Black'.

Adele herself called her music 'Heartbroken soul', with this I would concur, her voice at times soulful and angelic sounding like motown/Atlantic recording artists and at others splinted, raw and folky with remnants of the late Janis Joplin, but always powerful and so controlled, along with the heartbroken nature of her words is a very descriptive account of her work in two well thought out words. If you own the second album by Adele or not, no record collection is complete without this album.