Steven Adams balances light and shade on his latest solo artist recording.
Since calling time on The Broken Family Band at the height of their success, Steven Adams has released half a dozen albums under various guises, such as Singing Adams, Steven James Adams, Steven Adams & The French Drops. His latest release, Drops, is the first credited to him as a solo artist since 2016’s Old Magick, and his first new music since 2020. But rest assured: Drops still demonstrates Adams’ facility for social observation, gorgeous melodies, verbal dexterity and wordplay – with some trenchant social and political themes thrown in for good measure.
The songs on this album have undertaken their own extensive tour of duty before seeing the light of day – first to the Welsh countryside where Adams experimented on material with drummer Daniel Fordham and bassist David Stewart; then to a converted chapel on the south coast, with co-producer Simon Trought to lay down the basic tracks; before recording sessions were undertaken in East London; and then, finally, with Adams retiring to the French countryside, to work on the songs alone.
Such a long-running, complicated project could have ended up in a record which sounds overlayered and overworked, but it’s an iterative process that has instead proven highly successful. Opening number, Out To Sea, rivals The Divine Comedy’s At The Indie Disco with its gentle mockery and expert navigation of the gawky awkwardness of teenage boys at a dance hall: “Short sleeves, tight jeans, don’t tell your mother where you’ve been / All the boys out to sea, dance like it’s 1983.” Living In The Local Void, the first single from the album, shares the same propulsive, motorik beat featured on the song, Free Will, from his 2018 Virtue Signals album. The virtues of inertia have never sounded so alluring.
The high tempo is maintained for Moderation, with its thumping bass beat. It has Adams as the master of his own destiny – “both hands on the wheel at all times” – but the advancing years means that “every night’s a school night”. Meanwhile, the gorgeous hooks and swagger of Heads Keep Rolling will have many listeners nodding their own along in appreciation.
Making Holes, Adams’ favourite song from the album, is a moodier number, which slows the pace right down. It references our protagonist’s ability to find himself in difficulty through the issuance of verbal faux pas rather than making holes in a more literal, Bernard Cribbins style “there I was, a-digging this hole” kind of way. It signs off with some fuzzed-out guitar and spacey-sounding synth, which wouldn’t be out of place on a ’90s grunge classic.
The tongue-in-cheek, humorous content of some of the subject matter on these songs doesn’t mean that Adams has lost his facility to comment on more political matters, though. He’s trodden this path before on the likes of My Brother, The Racist, which featured on his 2020 album with The French Drops – and on the ponderous Fascists, he name-checks some well-known, modern-day British fascists and enablers of fascism. Sadly, it’s a far from comprehensive list – insert your own as you sing along. Almost as an immediate corrective, and perhaps in a rebuke to himself should he be accused of taking himself too seriously, he follows up this song with I Tried To Keep It Light. Maybe it’s also a rejoinder to his 2020 composition, Keep It Light, and an acknowledgement perhaps that he’d failed with the latter? Some things are just too serious to joke about.
Adams concludes the album by surfing an ocean of empathy with Cheap Wine Sad Face (“For every heart that breaks, there’s another one in pieces”).
Steven Adams has already been called a national musical treasure (by The Guardian, no less), and he is able to chart a course between songs which contrast light and shade, the serious alongside the humourous. We should be grateful that some fifteen years on, Steven Adams is still forging his own unique path.