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Find out more about Derk: Derk Richardson began writing about music in 1978 and is host of 'The Hear and Now' radio program, airing Thursday nights on KPFA-FM in Berkeley. He is a regular columnist at SFGate.com. |
Amy Winehouse might be a flake but she's not a fluke. England seems to be teeming with soul-pop singers right now, and the current pretender to the late Dusty Springfield's throne is Adele, who sounds like a cross between Winehouse and Springfield with a touch of crackling Karen Dalton. What's not to love about that?
Born Adele Adkins in Tottenham, London, just 19 years before her debut CD, 19, was released in the UK on the XL Recordings label (and picked up by Columbia Records for release this summer in the U.S.), the latest of the single-moniker divas had already won the first Brit Awards Critics Choice prize even before the album came out in January.
The buzz owes oodles to her live performances on BBC TV shows, which of course fill an entire YouTube queue, and not a little to the fact that Adele's been exploiting the potential of a MySpace page since New Year's Eve 2004.
That she has the voice to back up the hype is immediately evident when she sings against only her own bass playing on 19's second song, "Best for Last." She negotiates serpentine melodies with the sinewy assuredness of a python, adding the kinds of subtle ornamentations only possible if the snake is also a bluesy jazz singer steeped in Etta James and Nina Simone.
Catch a glimpse of her riveting voice-and-acoustic-guitar performance of the CD opener "Daydreamer" on "Later ... with Jools Holland," listen to her gripping cover of Bob Dylan's "Make You Feel My Love" or surrender to the powerfully Springfield-esquely orchestrated "Chasing Pavements" on her video-centric Web site, and you'll know why Adele's show at Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco this Thursday night, May 22, should be the hottest ticket in town, right Bump?
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