White-hot Adele delivers the goods

It is a fitting coincidence that Brit "It Girl" Adele launched her much-anticipated stateside tour the same weekend that Bridesmaids, team Apatow's rowdy girl-centric answer to The Hangover, opened in theaters across the country. The movie is a burgeoning box-office hit, and the singer is a budding superstar whose mass-appeal music could aptly be described as chick-flick soul.

Her calling card is that voice: Big, bracing, and acrobatic enough to wow the nattering class that tunes in weekly for American Idol, but inflected with a hard-won world-weariness that defies her tender age. Her recently released 21, titled after the London-based singer-songwriter's age when she recorded the album (Adele just turned 23), makes good on the promise of her lovelorn neo-soul breakout debut, 19, while upping the ante artistically.

All rainy days and Mondays, dead flowers and bittersweet regrets, 21 is post-break-up comfort food for the ears. Friday night at the way-way-sold-out Electric Factory (scalpers' tickets were going for hundreds of dollars online), Adele could do no wrong in the eyes and ears of the faithful, or, generally, in those of this neutral observer.

Taking the stage in a tasteful black frock and matching leggings, her ruby tresses elegantly backswept, Adele was framed by an array of Victorian lamp shades and backed by a crack seven-piece band.

She cutely snapped a keepsake picture of the capacity crowd before starting the concert with an earnest, hand-over-her-heart reading of 19's "Hometown Glory," a song choice that's presumably a subtle nod to the fact that she long ago traded local fame for the international variety. From there, she assayed the bulk of 21, which has topped the American album charts for the last seven weeks, like she's lived it.

There was the Streisand-ian power-balladry of "Don't You Remember," the Aretha-channeling "Rumour Has It," and "Take It All," which sounds like a long-lost outtake from Carole King's Tapestry. She also proved to be an adept interpreter of other people's songs, turning the Cure's "Lovesong" into sad-sack samba, converting Steeldrivers' bluegrass-stained "If It Hadn't Been for Love" into charming country blues, and rendering Dylan's "Make You Feel My Love" as a promise, not a threat.

Adele closed out the second of two encores with the unstoppable, I-will-survive "Rolling in the Deep," her first stateside No. 1 hit, but probably not her last.