A Review of the album Midnights by Taylor Swift
GENRE: Pop/R&B
LABEL: Republic
EVALUATED: 24 October 2022
Taylor Swift's 10th album pursues a more quiet and amorphous pop style that is more interested in creating atmosphere than following trends.
Reflection, not reinvention, is the theme of Midnights. That was extensively discussed by Taylor Swift in her own poetic language: "A collection of music written in the middle of the night, a voyage through terrors and lovely dreams" can be found in these 13 songs. The ideas that the 32-year-old songwriter has spent nine albums exploring are the ones that keep her up late: The unpredictability of love's surge and catastrophic fall;
After over a decade of increasingly high-profile collaborations, Swift's debut album Midnights is the first to be wholly recorded with Jack Antonoff. In the past, he has used expressive, technicolour synth pop to highlight Swift's ambitious, vivid storytelling. Here, in keeping with the late hour, they experiment with moodier, more sombre colours. Its subtle sound, which is based on vocal effects and antique synths, is more concerned with creating atmosphere than it is with following fashion trends. Swift examines the value of choosing a profession above a relationship in the mid-album standout "Midnight Rain," set against a crystalline backdrop.
The production amplifies her natural uptalk and gives her voice a dramatic lilt when she says, "He wanted comfortable/I wanted that pain."
The album sometimes makes me think of Lorde's Pure Heroine and how the sparse, hazy beats of that album cut through the denser radio hits of the early 2010s. It builds on the softly stuttering Reputation tracks "Delicate" and "Dress." Swift's progress can seem uneven, even as it's encouraging to hear her stretch her concept of pop beyond the fireworks of her pre-2020 songs. She has also brought back some of her more theatrical tendencies in her switch from the Americana-lite of Folklore to glittering electronica. She summons her sarcastic, shitstirring alter ego on "Karma" in a less spiteful mood, relishing in her competitors' inescapable retribution. Swift's attempts at edginess come across as a costume, yet the sinister, unsteady murmur hiding beneath the revenge fantasy "Vigilante Shit" evokes Billie Eilish's debut;
Swift's earlier albums were full-fledged musicals with dramatically different aesthetics; this one might work best as a stage show in a black-box theatre, where the tales are always evolving but the set is always stark. The film "Maroon," which begins in medias res on the morning after a night of drinking a roommate's "cheap-ass screw-top rosé," a syllabic feat, is where the effect is most interesting.
Swift moved away from crafting autobiographical songs for 2020's Folklore and Evermore and discovered new emotional depths in imaginary stories. She allowed herself the gift of emotional distance for what may have been the first time in a career founded on carefully controlled poetic bloodletting. With Midnights, she switches back to a journal-like format and addresses Taylor Swift's main battle between her true self and her public persona: She is excessively self-conscious yet hardly ever self-aware. On the album's lead single, "Anti-Hero," she sings, less winking and more jaded, "I'll stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror." It's her, hi/I'm the problem, she says at the bridge, cracking a painful sound as she compares herself to a Godzilla stomping a city of sexy kids and a performatively altruistic politician.
In the closing moments of Midnights, on "Mastermind," Swift returns to this conflict: "I swear/I'm only cryptic and Machiavellian 'cause I care." She affectingly gives her story a twist ending: the lover she has spent the entire song trying to win over realises her schemes. Swift frequently presents love as something that just occurs to her; in songs like "Don't Blame Me" and "You Belong With Me," she is constantly subject to the whims of love.
The dazzling "You're on Your Own, Kid," which engages in some traditional Swiftian mythmaking, is the most comparable song from the initial edition. The outsider, driven by unrequited love, retreats to her bedroom and composes the songs that give her the freedom to leave the small-town routine behind. She discovers that reality is not a storybook. She sings, subtly alluding to her battles with compulsive eating, "I gave my blood, sweat, and tears for this/I threw parties and starved my body/Like I'd be saved by a flawless kiss." She ends on a positive note by encouraging her audience to "create the friendship bracelets," emphasising that every mistake can serve as a teaching moment. But the unpleasant memories are still there, waiting for the stroke of midnight to bring them to memory.
Image credit: gettyimages.com
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