(2023) Adele H - Impermanence      


Review:
Adele H’s 2018 debut, Civilization, was largely a capella, the Italian singer’s voice looped and massed and harmonized into swelling crescendos, with only a little percussion for company. This time around, she adds some shadowy, minor key piano to her arsenal. The piano adds rhythm and solidity to songs, but it is still the voice that takes precedence. It floats and loops and flutters, letting wordless “ooh-ooh-oohs” vault across the scale and blowing workmanlike words like glass into fantastic shapes. The title track, for instance, begins in a regular, well-mannered series of piano arpeggios—if you grew up in the 1970s, you might get a whiff of Chicago’s “Color My World.” But it’s the singing that catches you up as it bends and pulls and stretches at the melody in slithery flourishes. Adele H has a way of softening, almost swallowing the consonants so that it’s hard to hear the words, but that just makes it easier to focus on the sonic pleasure of her blues-inflected delivery. By the cut’s end, the piano fades away, and the artist layers crystalline counterpoints on top of each other, the word “impermanence” interleaved in luminous harmonies. “Lucia” is quicker, more animated, almost jazzy in the way that Adele riffs on words, stringing them out in quick bursts of bursts of dazzling melody then cutting back to a spare chant. One piano note repeated holds down the rhythm, but the singing unfurls in free, organic profusion. The album includes alternate takes of five of its cuts, though the differences are very subtle. The second version of “Bubble of Gold” seems a bit more emphatic and full of drama than the first, but “April”’s stormy bursts of piano and skittering vocals seem much the same in both takes.   These works are moody and introspective. You feel almost as if you’re eavesdropping on some private reverie. Adele H muses on the personal—family, children, female empowerment—and explores the shape and possibility within each melodic phrase. She might be thinking it through as the tape rolls. The music comes out fresh and unstudied and lovely.  — dusted



Track List:
01 - Women's Power
02 - April
03 - Impermanence
04 - Mirror
05 - Lucia
06 - Francesco Touches the Night
07 - Bubble of Gold
08 - Ave Maria
09 - Rise and Fall
10 - Impermanence (Alternate Version)
11 - April (Alternate Version)
12 - Rise and Fall (Alternate Version)
13 - Francesco Touches the Night (Alternate Version)
14 - Bubble of Gold (Alternate Version)


Media Report:
Genre: art pop, dream-pop
Country: Italy
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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