The new 2 hour Taylor album is anything but 'swift'.
I hate long
albums. And I’ve never been the biggest Taylor Swift fan. But I thought I ought
to give this album a shot. I haven’t listened to a Taylor Swift album since Folklore
and since then Taylor has only continued to grow from superstar to hyperstar. Her
album cycles have become the biggest event in the musical calendar, and for me
to skip this album would be like a political commentator not covering a
national election.
Originally,
this album was only supposed contain 16 songs. But two hours after releasing
The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor decided to add 15 more. I’m hoping
she doesn’t add any other songs before I’ve finished writing this review.
Especially if they’re the same quality as what we’ve been served up here – this
is by far the worst album I’ve heard from Taylor Swift. Another hour of this
would indeed be ‘torture’.
Taylor has
some undeniable bops under her belt, but there are absolutely none on offer here.
Aside from ‘I Can Do It With A Broken Heart’ and its explosive chorus, the
marathon tracklist sees Taylor trundling along in first gear over dreary
minimal keys and guitars. The drums sound like stock samples and are
half-buried underneath everything else. And the vocal melodies are forgettable.
Perhaps
intentionally, this forces the listener to focus on Taylor’s tortured poetry. In
the first few tracks, we’re immediately bombarded with Gen Z slang like ‘down
bad’ and ‘I felt seen’, along with enough f-bombs to make Fred Durst wince. Taylor
has clearly adapted her songwriting to appeal to younger generations. However,
the old Taylor is still here. The song about an ex leaving a typewriter at her
house is both eyeroll-worthy and classic Taylor. In fact, it left me wanting
more colourful stories of eccentric douchebag exes.
The first
eight tracks are peppered with memorable lines about wine mums and Charlie Puth
apparently being underrated. But we don’t really get any truly clever penmanship from
Taylor until ‘Florida’. The line ‘my friends all smell like weed or little
babies’ is a brilliant observation of what it’s like to be a childfree thirty-something.
Unfortunately, the track is ruined by Florence and the Machine singing ‘Floridaaaaaa’
in her trademark annoying warble and Taylor concluding ‘Florida, go on, fuck
me up’.
Shortly after
this, the songs start to get forgettable. In fact, we get fourteen tracks of
almost nothing notable happening besides a surprise reference to The Black Dog pub
in London (which has since become a travel hotspot for Swifties). Track 22, ‘So High School’, at last breaks up the monotony with some
memorable lines – but they’re not memorable because they’re good. The song is a
00s nostalgia anthem that references ‘Aristotle’ for the sole reason
that it rhymes with ‘spin the bottle’. And then she attempts to rhyme ‘Aristostle’
with ‘Grand Theft Auto’. Ok, Taylor.
The most
bizarre lyric on the album appears in the track straight after this: ‘My
friends used to play a game where/ we would pick a decade/ we wish we could
live in instead of this/ I’d say the 1830s but without all the racists’. It’s
got an entertaining off-the-wall Mark Kozelek vibe to it, I guess? The difference is
that Swift sings it with sincerity in her voice. Why are we bringing 1830s
racism into this song? Why was that necessary?
The last leg
of this album is pretty uneventful and I zoned out from much of it, having
pretty much formed my opinion of this record. It’s an overstuffed and largely
uneventful slog of an album. On the rare occasion we do get a memorable lyric,
it’s either bad or bizarre. This leads me to believe that Taylor is largely freestyling
at this point. Folklore may have been just as instrumentally wishy-washy,
but it had genuine poetry on it that Taylor had clearly taken time to curate
and edit. The Tortured Poets Department feels like a bunch of rough drafts. It has a such a demoralised energy to it that I’m
half-inclined to believe that it was written by a bunch of poets being waterboarded and thumb-screwed in her mansion basement *proceeds to Google poets that have recently gone missing*.
★☆☆☆☆
TRACK TASTER: