Adele H – Impermanence (Album Review)

Adele H – Impermanence (Obsolete Recordings/Ramble Records) 15 September 2023

Adele H is the alias of Adele Pappalardo, an experimental pop singer and musician from the city of Bergamo in northern Italy. While she lists Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone and Tori Amos amongst her influences, there is also a rich and visible thread of European innovation running through her work. Tracks like Primordial Sound, from her 2018 album Civilization, sound like Italian vocalist Romina Daniele channelling Mitchell’s percussive masterpiece The Jungle Line. Once A Day, from the same album, fuses the recording techniques of contemporary experimentalism with a Brigitte Fontaine-esque avant-pop sensibility.

Percussion formed the bedrock of much of Adele’s output up to and including Civilization: visceral rhythms played off against her raw but clear vocal style with results that seemed like dramatic outpourings of emotion or psychedelic forays. On Laughing Song, from 2015’s Offcuts, her own vocalisations, looped and multiplied, become the percussion. It sounds like the more experimental moments of Buffy Sainte-Marie mixed with the aforementioned Romina Daniele and Swedish psych-soul innovators Wildbirds & Peacedrums. But on her new album Impermanence, Adele largely eschews percussion, or any form of musical abrasiveness for that matter, preferring instead to opt for an ostensibly softer sound characterised by the use of minimal or neo-classical piano motifs.

Though at first, this new direction may appear less challenging, a more concerted listen reveals a new depth to Adele’s lyrical preoccupations, while the vocal arrangements remain unorthodox and often complex in spite of their more outwardly tuneful settings. Opener Women’s Power acts as a statement of intent, a startling and potent song with the feel of an invocation or an incantation. The simple four-note piano intro has a sense of foreboding but also suggests stability and sturdiness, while the vocals provide the barely constrained passion, the subtle anger, the contrasting but somehow overlapping forces of fragility and strength.

On April, the piano burbles and gushes like a stream as Adele’s vocals take a more impressionistic turn, soaring high and then draping themselves over the song’s framework. The use of multitracking here gives the song an added element of flightiness, a sense of ideas being born and springing off in every direction. The title track is a more reflective affair which almost sounds like a standard piano ballad for its first half before the pace shifts and a satisfying jerkiness is introduced, before the final flourish: the song’s title repeated and layered until the effect is almost like a heavenly choir. It is a paean to change, a hymn of acceptance of the fluidity and unpredictability of life.

The notes on Mirror are off-kilter, even mildly disturbing, creating an uncanny juxtaposition with the clarity and near-perfection of the vocals. This juxtaposition seems to imply the unpredictability that was hinted at in the previous song and lends a delectable jazzy taste to proceedings. Bubble of Gold most resembles a pop song; it is the most Joni Mitchell-esque song here, though Adele’s singing has more in common with the great soul and jazz vocalists. It flutters unexpectedly or drops imperceptibly, creating interesting and unique contours of sound within every song. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on her style, some small but surprising turn leaves you in a state of mild, pleasant bewilderment.

Spirituality and femininity return as themes throughout the album. ‘The meaning of life is life itself’, Adele sings in the minimal but hauntingly profound Lucia, and the line’s significance comes in the way she makes it seem like both a piece of very personal advice and a general philosophical statement. Francesco Touches the Night is a tender, wandering piano instrumental with an almost liturgical feel to it as if something of sacred beauty is being described abstractly. Ave Maria turns the familiar Latin prayer into something strange and beautiful, embodying in less than a minute and a half some of the mysteries and complexities of Catholic worship. It recalls ancient monastic chants but is firmly rooted in modern recording techniques: another example of the beguiling contradictions that exist just below the surface of Impermanence.

Rise and Fall is another song full of dichotomies: to begin with, a robust, insistent piano line rubs shoulders with an unpindownable vocal that squirms and hops in a direct allusion to the song’s title before the whole thing cascades into deeper and more philosophical territory. Lyrically, it taps into feminism and discusses the inconsistent nature of happiness and the human condition. In fact, the whole album seems in tune with these inconsistencies: even the cover, with its lurid pink typeface superimposed on to an idyllic woodland scene, seems like the encroachment of something strange onto the natural order, like a Giallo film set in paradise. These impositions are subtle, feminine and haunting.

Impermanence was recorded and mixed by Buck Curran, the American singer, songwriter and guitarist who is also Adele’s partner. Curran’s intimate settings help bring both light and depth to these recordings, which have a live feel to them. This, combined with the album’s spiritual themes, has the effect of turning the studio into a kind of sacred space, which in turn makes the music feel all the more important, all the more consequential. This is particularly the case in the final song, a reprise of the title track on which the layered vocals seem to float like a veil over the rippling piano, before the transcendent final section. These last moments perhaps represent the shedding of the weight of history, and although that weight has been borne lightly over the course of the album, it still feels like a moment of beautiful release.

Adele Pappalardo’s greatest asset is her voice: inimitable, malleable, dripping with passion and personality. The transition to piano-based songs on Impermanence has allowed that voice to flourish, which in turn has opened up new and intensely personal ways of writing and presenting songs. The resulting album transcends its varied influences and becomes a wonderful and, at times, cathartic work of art, brimming with confidence and bursting with important questions about womanhood, metaphysics and music.