Adele – Set Fire to the Rain
Single handedly saving the music industry, apparently.
[Video][Website]
[4.75]
Pete Baran: “Daddy, what did you do in the Adele Wars?” a future child might ask, and I fear they will get the same answer they got when they previously asked me “Daddy, what did you do in the Coldplay Wars?”. I stood on the sidelines, not sure what all the fuss was about, finding neither act deserving of the massive sales or adulation, but admitting that they were quite good at what they do. “Set Fire to the Rain” benefits from an impossible central metaphor to make it interesting. Much like some other act noticing the stars were all yellow (even if they aren’t).
[4]
Anthony Easton: I keep trying to get Adele, and I think my problem with this, on a general level is that it doesn’t have any desperation — beautiful voice, but it’s not pure enough not to need the roughness, and it’s not rough enough not to need the purity. The advantage of something like “Rolling in Deep,” is that she skillfully works through a bombastic anglo tradition that weds the instincts of Bassey to the longing of Winehouse, and collapses the category into her own time and place. This song tries to do the whiskey soaked lassitude of Dusty and Marianne Faithfull — the yin to the previous traditions bombast — and you sense she could do it, but Dusty broke yr heart, and Faithfull was ruined — there is no ruin in Adele’s practice. Disappointing.
[6]
Matthew Harris: Sure, the Dusty-like way Adele can, at the song’s beginning, let her vocals cool to a cracked whisper is undeniably wonderful. But then everything balloons into a cavern recently hollowed out by a Coldplay song, with violins and pianos fluttering around the ascending and over-reverbed vocals. And the vague, confusing lyrics (how can rain “scream your name”?) sound like the type of teenage poetry you write when you long less for actual romance, but for the adult experience a failed romance brings. I’m the biggest fan of teenage sentiments, but not when they’re dressed in a sober pantsuit.
[4]
Alfred Soto: It takes stronger chutzpah and worse taste than Adele’s to transform fire and rain into powerful symbols again; the surprise is she almost does. Bits of melisma and her use of repetition are more suited to a dance track, but don’t tell the fans who’ve made her the latest avatar for British Good Taste.
[6]
Zach Lyon: Yeah, we’re still in the middle of Adele’s feels-like-four-hundred-weeks run at the top of the charts with a song that’s only there for reasons entirely unmusical, so I’m going to have trouble not judging this on a bitter curve. This doesn’t blow me away. It does nothing to rid my brain of the thought that Adele has turned herself into a vessel for self-righteous rockism and that she has done so by making supremely lifeless music. This is an exercise in posturing, lacking in urgency, even the urgency to communicate why such posturing could ever have a point. It doesn’t. At least Winehouse had enough sense to not act a martyr on everyone, and she did it with at least a millimeter of personality, too.
[3]
Chuck Eddy: Given that Adele’s got the Year’s Biggest Album, I naively assumed that, when I finally heard a song from it (this is the first — yes, I do in fact live in cave), it’d somehow feel like a major leap — concept-wise, hook- wise, middlebrow-turned-upper-middlebrow-wise, whatever — from what she was doing last time out. Didn’t expect to like it, but expected something. But this is just… wow. I basically hate Amy Winehouse, and I get how re-imagining Amy’s constipated faux soul revival minus her unhealthy aspects might add up to a salable commodity. But next to this nonentity, Amy is Aretha.
[3]
Jonathan Bradley: If you loved Dido, Joss Stone, Amy Winehouse, and Duffy, here’s someone else you’ll forget about next year who makes real music.
[3]
B Michael Payne: I’ve never heard Adele in a non-television context. Listening as I did through my laptop speakers, I think her voice was perhaps underserved. It’s certainly not bad, but it seems like an over-articulated champagne flute: There are a lot of details, but they’re employed in the service of something extremely insubstantial. Lyrics-wise, I dislike songs like this, a permutation of “Ironic.” The first verse’s poetics of postural juxtaposition leaves me cold. The titular hook makes me think of every bad movie I’ve ever seen.
[5]
Jer Fairall: This felt like a low point on 21‘s slapdash patchwork of superstar writers and producers (this time Fraser T. Smith, he of “Break Your Heart” and “Dirty Picture”) back when I wrote about it, and for a good minute I am able to forget exactly why that was. Then the bombastic, string-drenched chorus kicks in and sweeps away whatever elegance Adele had let build up until that point into a mess of overwrought sentiment, like an American Idol showpiece for those who felt “Rolling in the Deep” failed to offer the requisite potential for melismatic grandstanding.
[4]
Sally O’Rourke: An attempt to wed the faint-but-audible pulse of “Rolling in the Deep” to the dinner party piano of “Someone Like You,” “Set Fire to the Rain” succeeds only in suggesting that maybe Adele really is as dull as 19 sounded. Based on the title, I was half-expecting a Snow Patrol mash-up. At least those guys can engineer a memorable chorus.
[4]
Jonathan Bogart: It was when I listened to this right before Beyoncé’s “1+1” that Adele came into focus for me properly: she’s indie not because the economics of her pop stardom are any different from anyone else’s, but because in her music passion, and nailing a particular, previously-uninhabited tone, trumps skill. Beyoncé has total control over her instrument; Adele is carried along by hers, and when it has the perfect setting (starts with R, ends with Olling in the Deep) it’s the greatest noise in the world. But when the setting’s more generic, as it is here — this could be a Pussycat Dolls song if the lyrics were smarter — she’s somehow lost in that voice, so much bigger than she is, and all the choking passion rings hollow.
[6]
Michaela Drapes: The construction of this song, like everything else Adele’s done to date, is impeccable: the delicately proportioned swell of the meandering verses into the explosive chorus into the heart-rending bridge into the suitably bleak coda into the please-baby-please outro. I’ve listened to both 21 and 19 a lot, and I’ve wavered on whether I find Adele’s suites of perfect songs bloodless and depressing or impossibly amazing; this song is definitely the latter. With a bow on it.
[9]