The Daily Telegraph - Features
ALBUM OF THE WEEK
Midnights (Republic)
Taylor Swift ★★★★★
“I should not be left to my own devices,” Taylor Swift proclaims on her self-excoriating new song Anti-Hero, laying out the reasons why: “They come with prices and vices, I end up in crisis.” She wallows in depression, calls herself a “monster” and worries about “covert narcissism I disguise as altruism, like some kind of congressman”. The chorus says “I’m the problem, it’s me” – albeit a perky melody implies she may not be entirely serious.
To be fair, it must be quite hard work being Taylor Swift. The superstar singersongwriter is almost ridiculously prolific. At 32 years old, Midnights is officially her 10th album – but also her sixth major release in the past four years (including two early albums re-recorded for copyright reasons). Before each release comes an elaborate marketing campaign, over which Swift presides with a fastidious attention to detail that has marked each step of her rise from country ingénue to global brand.
On the playful Mastermind, Swift exults in her capacity for planning: “I laid the groundwork / And then just like clockwork / The dominoes cascaded in line… it was all by design.” Yet even in jest, she roots such controlling impulses in unhappiness: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since.”
Swift attracted her devoted audience as an astutely observational chronicler of the inner life of young women asserting their right for love and respect in a maledominated world. Her source material has often been implicitly autobiographical, although the fact that she has now been in a steady relationship with English actor Joe Alwyn for six years presumably provides its own challenges for songcraft rooted in everyday tales of dating, promiscuity, love and heartbreak. She outlined her concept for Midnights as “stories of 13 sleepless nights scattered throughout my life”, and, indeed, the 13 songs are plagued by insecurities, racked with doubts and regrets. It isn’t, however, quite blood on the tracks: the overall tone is light, as if she were exploring aspects of her personality at one remove from the rawness of the emotional content.
Midnights pivots back towards mainstream pop, following the analogue Americana of her more reflective pandemic albums, Folklore and Evermore. Still working primarily with ubiquitous writer-producer Jack Antonoff (Lorde, St Vincent, Florence & the Machine), it has a sensuous electro-digital sound.
Yet despite the Prince-like falsetto funkiness of Lavender Haze and glib strut of
Bejeweled, there are no obvious chart-smashing bangers. It is almost as if Swift had become too mature for the brand of meme-friendly earworm pop with which she made her name. In fact, in Snow on the Beach with Lana Del Rey – who has built a cult following around her ironic self-aware songcraft – the pair sound almost interchangeable.
Midnights is the sound of an artist betwixt and between, uncertain whether to press deeper into intimate songcraft or restart a commercial juggernaut. The album’s prettiest and least arch song,
Sweet Nothings, grapples tenderly with this very dilemma. “Industry disruptors and soul deconstructors / And smooth-talking hucksters / Out glad-handing each other / And the voices that implore / ‘You should be doing more’ / To you I can admit / That I’m just too soft for all of it.”
Midnights represents Swift at a turning point, and I am not sure whether it is a curtain falling on her imperial phase, or the sign of a new pop dawn.
Also out Arctic Monkeys, ‘The Car’ (Domino); Dry Cleaning, ‘Stumpwork’ (4AD); Tegan and Sara, ‘Crybaby’ (Mom + Pop Music)