Feeling bad is good enough for frank singer Adele, fans

For the most part, Adele is the inverse of her tunes: Her catalog is as posited on loss as the casino in which she sang on Saturday night, and yet still she beams with the bulletproof buoyancy of a lady who could turn a rainy day into cause for celebration, if only for the chance to go splashing around in some puddles for a bit.

Feeling bad, well, it's not so bad.

"It's better when something is wrong. You get excitement in your bones and everything you do is a game," she sang during the playful bop of "Right as Rain." "At least when you're at your worst, you know how to feel things," she noted at song's end.

Adele's fond of these kind of lead-into-gold moments.

She embraces her flaws like kin and, true to form, regards them in the way that real life family members often get treated: No matter how embarrassing and uncouth they may be, they're still loved because they frequently play a central role in shaping who we are.

"I know I have a fickle heart and bitterness and a wandering eye and a heaviness in my head," Adele sang on the spare, stirring torch song "Don't You Remember," cataloging her shortcomings with a voice as big as said list.

This sad-eyed skill set is one of the things that most distinguishes her from the other twenty-something starlets atop the pop charts who generally come with a self-esteem coated in Kevlar and a sexuality that often gets fired at listeners like a slug from a .357.

Rihanna, for instance, might frequently be wronged in her tunes, but she seldom portrays herself as ever being in the wrong, preferring instead to exude an unwavering self-assuredness to underscore a fierce feminine assertiveness, which is laudable, but not something that's all that easy to identify with.

Adele, on the other hand, is as easy to relate to as heartache itself.

None of this to suggest that the congenial Brit singer is some lovelorn mope -- she's far from it, in fact, with a lack of pretense about herself equates to the loose, uninhibited stage presence of someone wholly comfortable in her own skin, no matter how scarred, metaphorically speaking, that it may be.

At a sold-out Chelsea Ballroom at The Cosmopolitan on Saturday night, Adele struck the unhurried, good-humored air of someone serenading a group of friends in her living room after a couple of glasses of wine, chatting between songs about everything from the recent weight gain of her wiener dog to her fondness for the reality show "Basketball Wives."

She offered up at least a partial explanation for her strong spirits, explaining that she had recently made amends with the former flame whom much of her current smash album, "21," is about.

As such, she sang with particular emotion on this night, nearly getting choked up during "Take It All" while clamping her eyes shut, as if to give herself fully to the moment, for "Turning Tables."

There was plenty of defiance, however, to momentarily plug this dam burst of longing and regret.

Adele finished the finger-snapping kiss-off of "Rumour Has It" with middle fingers extended, and on ubiquitous hit "Rollin' in the Deep," she warned of the consequences of raising her ire.

"Go ahead and sell me out, and I'll lay your ship bare," she sang vehemently, implying menace like a cat with its back arched.

Adele's Motown-influenced R&B, which ranges from bluesy bombast to a soulful smolder, is fresh and nostalgic at once, as many of her tunes register like something you've heard before.

But they're familiar in a good way, like the welcome warmth of a favorite old sweater.

To wit, the most well-received number of the night, brittle-hearted ballad "Someone Like You," could have just as easily have been sung by Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight or even Dolly Parton.

"Sometimes it lasts in love, but sometimes it hurts instead," Adele sang as the crowd joined in passionately on the song, making her pain their own -- not that there was ever much distance between the two to begin with.