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Taylor Swift's '1989': New Album Review
 
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For almost a decade, Taylor Swift has been waging, and winning, a war, smiling all the while.
 
Country music has been — was — a natural enemy for her: hidebound, slow moving, lousy with machismo. She could break the rules and make people nervous simply by showing up. And yet country was also a hospitable host body. She faced almost no direct competition there, and it’s a genre that embraces success, grudgingly if need be.
 
Most important, country gave Ms. Swift context. It made her a transgressor, which means even her most benign songs could be read with mischievous intent. From the outside, she looked like a conquering titan. But from the inside looking out, even as the genre’s biggest star, she was always something of an underdog, multiplatinum albums and accolades be damned.
 
That she would one day abandon country has long been clear. It’s a big box, and a porous one, but a box all the same. “1989” (Big Machine), though, her fifth album and the first that doesn’t at all bother with country, manages to find a new foe.
 
Full of expertly constructed, slightly neutered songs about heartbreak, “1989,” which is to be released on Monday, doesn’t announce itself as oppositional. But there is an implicit enemy on this breezily effective album: the rest of mainstream pop, which “1989” has almost nothing in common with. Modern pop stars — white pop stars, that is — mainly get there by emulating black music. Think of Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber. In the current ecosystem, Katy Perry is probably the pop star least reliant on hip-hop and R&B to make her sound, but her biggest recent hit featured the rapper Juicy J; she’s not immune.
 
Ms. Swift, though, is having none of that; what she doesn’t do on this album is as important as what she does. There is no production by Diplo or Mike Will Made-It here, no guest verse by Drake or Pitbull. Her idea of pop music harks back to a period — the mid-1980s — when pop was less overtly hybrid. That choice allows her to stake out popular turf without having to keep up with the latest microtrends, and without being accused of cultural appropriation.
 
That Ms. Swift wants to be left out of those debates was clear in the video for this album’s first single, the spry “Shake It Off,” in which she surrounds herself with all sorts of hip-hop dancers and bumbles all the moves. Later in the video, she surrounds herself with regular folks, and they all shimmy un-self-consciously, not trying to be cool.
 
See what Ms. Swift did there? The singer most likely to sell the most copies of any album this year has written herself a narrative in which she’s still the outsider. She is the butterfingers in a group of experts, the approachable one in a sea of high post, the small-town girl learning to navigate the big city.
 
In that sense, the most important decision Taylor Swift made in the last couple of years had nothing to do with music: She bought a pad in New York, paying about $20 million for a TriBeCa penthouse.
 
It was a molting, the culmination of several years of outgrowing Nashville combined with interest in Ms. Swift that placed her in tabloid cross-hairs just like any other global star.
 
But it also afforded her the opportunity once again to be seen as a naïf. In Nashville, she’d learned all the rules, all the back roads. Now, with that place more or less in the rear view, she is free to make the John Hughes movie of her imagination. That’s “1989,” which opens with “Welcome to New York,” a shimmery, if slightly dim celebration of the freedom of getting lost in Gotham: “Everybody here was someone else before/And you can want who you want.” (As a gesture of tolerance, this is about 10 steps behind Kacey Musgraves’s “Follow Your Arrow.”)
 
Ms. Swift hasn’t been the type to ask permission in her career, but she has long seen herself as a stranger to the grand-scale fame that New York signifies. “Someday I’ll be living in a big ol’ city” she taunted a critic on “Mean,” from her 2010 album “Speak Now”; now here she is, making the New York spotlight her backlight.
 
On this new stage, Ms. Swift is thriving. And crucially, she is more or less alone, not part of any pop movement of the day. She has set herself apart and, implicitly, above.
 
The era of pop she channels here was a collision of sleaze and romanticism, of the human and the digital. But there’s barely any loucheness in Ms. Swift’s voice. Her take on that sound is sandpapered flat and polished to a sheen. The album, named for the year she was born, is executive produced by Ms. Swift and Max Martin, and most of the songs are written with Mr. Martin and his fellow Swede Shellback. Both men have helped shape the last decade of pop but what’s notable here is their restraint. (Mr. Martin also did almost all the vocal production on the album.) Ms. Swift’s old running buddy Nathan Chapman produced “This Love,” a mournful ballad that would have been at home of the “Hunger Games: Catching Fire” soundtrack, and the only song here that could be mistaken for a concession to country.
 
The best country-defying songs on her last album, “Red” — especially “I Knew You Were Trouble,” another collaboration with Mr. Martin and Shellback — were also a move toward forward-sounding pop. Ms. Swift has many charms but stylistic envelope pushing has not always been among them. And yet those songs showed her to be more of a risk taker than she’d ever been, and savvy enough to know her fans would follow.
 
That vanguard attitude, though, isn’t to be found on “1989,” which is largely filled with upbeat, tense songs on which the singer stomps out much of whatever was left of her youthful innocence. The Taylor Swift of this album is savage, wry, and pointed. The high mark is “Style,” which recalls something from the original “Miami Vice” soundtrack, all warm synths and damp vocals. “Midnight/You come and pick me up/No headlights,” she oozes at the beginning of the song. By the chorus, she’s flirty, but back in the verses, she’s skeptical and a little bedraggled.
 
Ms. Swift has often sung in a talky manner, emphasizing intimacy over power and nuance, but on “1989” she uses her voice — processed more than ever — in different ways than before: the coy confidence of how she shifts gears leading up to the bridge in “Shake It Off,” slithering out the line, “But I keep cruising,” immediately changing the song from gum-snapping glee to powerful release. Or the way she sweetly drags out the long e in “beat” on “Welcome to New York”; or the bratty background chorus chants on “All You Had to Do Was Stay.”
 
Her most pronounced vocal tweak is on “Wildest Dreams,” a sweaty and dark tale of dangerous love. In the verses, Ms. Swift sings drowsily, as if seducing or just waking up: “I said ‘No one has to know what we do'/ His hands are in my hair/ His clothes are in my room.” Then, at the bridge, she skips up an octave, sputtering out bleats of ecstasy, before retreating back under the covers.
 
On this album, Ms. Swift’s songwriting isn’t as microdetailed as it has been, instead approaching heartbreak with a wider lens, as on “This Love”:
 
Tossing, turning, struggled through the night with someone new
 
And I could go on and on, on and on
 
Lantern, burning, flickered in my mind for only you
 
But you were still gone, gone, gone
 
And while there are certainly references to some of Ms. Swift’s high-profile relationships, the album on the whole feels less diaristic than her previous work.
 
But don’t be distracted by for whom the belle trolls; she trolls with glee, and that’s what matters. Take the clever “Blank Space,” a metanarrative about Ms. Swift’s reputation as a dating disaster:
 
Saw you there and I thought
 
Oh my God, look at that face
 
You look like my next mistake
 
Love’s a game, want to plaaaaaay?
 
This is Ms. Swift at her peak. It’s funny and knowing, and serves to assert both her power and her primness. By contrast, the songs where she sounds the least jaded — “How You Get the Girl,” “Welcome to New York” — are among the least effective.
 
It’s hard for Ms. Swift to still sell naïveté; she’s too well-known and too good at her job. That’s likely at least part of the reason that the bonus edition of this album includes three voice memos recorded by Ms. Swift on her telephone that showcase bits of songs in their early stages. They’re there as gifts for obsessives, but also as boasts, flaunting her expertise and also her aw-shucks demeanor. “I Wish You Would” shows her singing without any vocal manipulation, and though the lyrics to “I Know Places” and “Blank Space” changed a bunch from this stage to the final version, it’s clear that the melodies were intact, and sturdy, from the beginning.
 
There are a few songs in which production dominates: the two songs written and produced with Jack Antonoff (of fun and Bleachers). “Out of the Woods” and “I Wish You Would,” which burst with erupting drums, moody synths and sizzling guitars; and “Bad Blood,” which has booming drums reminiscent of the Billy Squier ones often sampled in hip-hop.
 
But these are outliers. Ms. Swift has always been melody first, and if she wanted to give herself over to a producer and sound of the moment, she could have gone several different, more obvious routes, or even stayed in country, which is as hip-hop inflected as pop is these days. (For the record, there are a few sort-of-modern phrases sprinkled through the lyrics — “this sick beat,” " mad love” and the chorus of “Shake It Off,” where she squeaks “the players gonna play, play, play, play, play/and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” — though they are mostly there to underscore just how out of place Ms. Swift sounds singing them.)
 
But by making pop with almost no contemporary references, Ms. Swift is aiming somewhere even higher, a mode of timelessness that few true pop stars — aside from, say, Adele, who has a vocal gift that demands such an approach — even bother aspiring to. Everyone else striving to sound like now will have to shift gears once the now sound changes. But not Ms. Swift, who’s waging, and winning, a new war, one she’d never admit to fighting.
 
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On her new album, Taylor Swift goes full-throttle pop 
 
“Took our broken hearts and put them in a drawer,” Taylor Swift sings on “Welcome to New York,” the opening track on her fifth and sharpest album, 1989. Coming from Swift, a superstar who built a global empire penning hits about matters of the heart, this sounds like a threat–stowing her sorrow away after it brought so much success seems borderline irresponsible.
 
But Swift has gambled before and won. After writing every song solo on her blockbuster 2010 country-crossover album, Speak Now, she teamed up with a varied roster of top-shelf tunesmiths for 2012’s sprawling, genre-spanning opus, Red. That album went quadruple platinum, earned rapt critical acclaim and four Grammy nods and made her an icon.
 
On 1989, out Oct. 27, she sounds like one. Leaner and keener than those on Red, her new songs fizz and crackle with electricity and self-aware wit. Driven by synths and drums in lieu of guitars, all trace of country abandoned, 1989 holds together sonically as a tribute to the electro-pop that dominated radio 25 years ago. Swift executive-produced the album alongside Swedish hit machine Max Martin, who lends pop shellack to her nimble lyrics. Winding choruses have been whittled down to their stickiest essence.
 
Thematically, too, Swift breaks with the past, skirting victimhood and takedowns of maddening exes, critics and romantic competitors. Instead, there’s a newfound levity. Not only is Swift in on the joke; she also relishes it. The bouncy “Blank Space” hyperbolizes her portrayal in the media as an overly attached man-eater who dates for songwriting material: “Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane/ But I’ve got a blank space,” she coos before, incredibly, a clicking sound like that of a pen, “and I’ll write your name.” The skronky, horn-driven lead single “Shake It Off” communicates a cheerful disinterest in being critiqued, and a panicked, operatic vocal sample of Swift singing the word “Stay!” gives the swerving “All You Had to Do Was Stay” an oddball kick. The angriest song here is “Bad Blood,” a chanting call to arms over a dispute with a frenemy, and even it feels tongue-in-cheek.
 
Instead of pain, the songs about romance vibrate with fluttering lust or wistful nostalgia. The winking disco anthem “Style” packs a nasty ’70s groove, while strings and a lush refrain lend “Wildest Dreams” a cinematic grandeur: “He’s so tall, and handsome as hell,” she exhales. Surging drums and a jagged bassline, courtesy of fun. rocker Jack Antonoff, mitigate the longing of “I Wish You Would.” Even the atmospheric electro-ballad “This Love” is more hopeful than anguished, enlivened by a catchy chorus and Swift’s breathless delivery.
 
Though Swift is skilled with melody, her deadliest weapon is a superhuman knack for tight, evocative images–a skill she employs sparingly here. On the tense “Out of the Woods,” she ruefully recounts deciding “to move the furniture so we could dance,” while the feathery “Clean,” a collaboration with English composer Imogen Heap, sees her comparing a relationship to “a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore.” But the most potent statements are sonic, like “I Know Places,” a thrillingly paranoid cut with a drum-and-bass-like intensity. It’s the album’s darkest moment, until the chorus fills the song with light.
 
As long Swift writes autobiographically, her romantic affairs will be the subject of speculation, but it’s the expertly crafted sound of 1989 that marks her most impressive sleight of hand yet–shifting the focus away from her past and onto her music, which is as smart and confident as it’s ever been. Who are these songs about? When they sound this good, who cares?
 
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Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’: Album Review
Singer’s homage to the synth-pop days of the ‘80s has some retro charm, but seems less substantial than her previous work.
 
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Taylor Swift chose a strange era to be nostalgic for on her new album. Everything about it, from the title (“1989”) to the sound (synth-pop) pines for the waning days of the ‘80s, circa “Dynasty” and Ronald Reagan.
 
Problem is, Swift was barely one month old in the album’s title year, so she could not possibly have been aware of the sounds surrounding her. She can, however, retro-actively worship them. But it’s telling that she would choose to do so just now.
 
A mere seven weeks from her 25th birthday, Swift has put out an album that, in substance, seems more regressive, teenage and girlish than ever. However radio-savvy and hook-obsessed it may be, it’s her flightiest and least substantial work to date. Which is saying something.
 
Ironically, the surface of Swift’s album finds her changing dramatically. It leaves behind every last sign of her early Nashville country sound - not that anyone would have mistaken her for Loretta Lynne before. But in place of even a hint of a fiddle or pedal steel guitar is something new: an array of antique synthesizers. The ones here sound like they haven’t been touched since the days when Gary Numan ruled.
 
Swift bold-faces her intention to ditch her past by opening the album with the now much discussed song “Welcome To New Yord.” It finds her naively oonig and ahhing over our city’s sense of possibility. Conforming to her character, and her target teen audience, the song is willfully naive and candy-coated.
 
So is most everything that follows. The synths that define the album, and make it uniform, aren’t of a deep, rich, or modern kind. They’re nostalgically dinky, aping the thin and tinny sound of an outmoded brand of pop. Of course, for her youngest fans, this may sound new. But older listeners will immediately bring to mind records by Sheena Easton in the ‘80s or Kim Wilde, circa “Kids In America.” No one could miss the antique reference of the album’s first single: “Shake It Off” apes Toni Basil’s old cheerleading hit “Mickey.”
 
The new wave sound - anchored on brisk claps, cracks and booms - gives Swift’s new songs a certain breezy appeal. But her choruses tend to rest on a songwriter’s laziest fall-back: the repetitive, arena-mongering chant.
 
Like the music, Swift hasn’t looked ahead in her lyrics either. At least she minimized the tic of alluding to past boyfriends. The barely coded references to Harry Styles in “Out of the Woods” rate as the sole obvious one. Otherwise, her subjects conform to her patented viewpoints. She doles out songs about loving bad boys (2), ignoring haters (2), stalking a guy (2), along with one about lost love, and another about the evil paparazzi.
 
The teenage dreaminess of it all reeks of protecting market share. It suggests Swift didn’t dare try to grow, lest she leave her core fans - very young girls - behind. That strategy will thrill her record company and her financial advisor. But it leaves her looking stunted and scared. She ends up as a just a teen-pop machine - and as someone who has yet to figure out how to act her age.
 
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Taylor Swift parties, and yearns, like it's '1989'
 
If you are not aware that Taylor Swift has a new album out Monday, it's certainly not her fault, or ours. The rollout for 1989 (***½ out of four stars) named for the superstar's birth year, has been as meticulous and as eagerly pored over as a presidential campaign, and its ascent on the pop charts is as certain as death and taxes — and likely anticipated with as much dread by some folks.
 
Never mind the haters, though. Swift's genius — or part of it, anyway — has been to turn the same mix of unabashed neediness and cunning that can make her tough to defend as a celebrity into rock-solid musical assets. On 1989, she matches deceptively simple, irresistibly catchy melodies with lyrics that can seem by turns confessional and elusive, playful and aching.
 
"I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream," Swift sings on Blank Space, a sparkling tease that also nods to a "long list of ex-lovers who'll tell you that I'm crazy." For the more sober, spacious Bad Blood, she shifts into full-on drama queen mode, telling one of those exes, presumably, that she still bears "scars on my back from your knife. ... Band-Aids don't fix bullet holes."
 
Executive produced by Swift and Max Martin, 1989 is Swift's declaration of independence from the country music industry that inspired and nurtured her, but was never really a natural home. Always more of a pop singer/songwriter at heart, she teams with expert tunesmiths in that genre — in addition to Martin, Shellback, Ryan Tedder and Jack Antonoff — to craft songs that, as the title suggests, nod to a previous era, when the term electro-pop didn't evoke the R&B- and club-based grooves of EDM.
 
 
That's not to say that 1989 is without more organic touches, or rhythmic intuition. Guitars pop up frequently; horns lend a funky vibe to Shake It Off, while I Know Places offers a shuffling, artfully syncopated beat.
 
Bubbly synth chords and clean, crisp percussion dominate big, airy arrangements on songs such as Style, which could be a lost Berlin track, and Welcome to New York, a love letter to a city that "keeps you guessing" and "drives you crazy" — like any great relationship, right?
 
Swift may no longer be that naive, as it turns out. On the warm, dreamy This Love, she sings, "When you're young/ You just run/ But you come back to what you need."
 
At 24, of course, Swift is still in her youth, and likely has plenty of searching ahead of her — and plenty of folks who will watch, and listen, as she moves forward.
 
Download: This Love, How You Get the Girl, All You Had to Do Was Stay.
 
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Taylor Swift: 1989 review – leagues ahead of the teen-pop competition
 
Why do people take Taylor Swift so much more seriously than her peers? Great songs, smart turns of phrase and a noticeable lack of the usual hollow pop platitudes all help.
 
At 24 years old, Taylor Swift inhabits something of a unique position within the teen pop firmament. It’s not merely the fact of her immense popularity, although the sheer devotion of her fans can sometimes knock you back a bit: earlier this week, when Swift released a track consisting of eight seconds of static to iTunes – alas, the result of a technical malfunction, rather than a radical new power-electronics direction influenced by Right to Kill-era Whitehouse and Genocide Organ – her fans in Canada bought it in such quantities that it went to No 1. It’s more that Swift’s music attracts the kind of serious critical attention afforded almost none of her peers. You don’t get many learned articles in the New Yorker about the songcraft of Swift’s mortal enemy Katy Perry. No acclaimed noveliest has felt impelled to take to the pages of Salon to defend the fact that he doesn’t like Jessie J, which Rick Moody did after expressing a dislike of Swift.
 
On one level, that is irrelevant. What do the vast majority of Taylor Swift fans – the tweenage Instagrammers to whom Swift, according to her ghastly record company biography, represents a “loyal friend, fierce protector of hearts and one of the world’s greatest ambassadors for the power of just being yourself” – care whether their tastes have been anointed by the New Yorker? But on another, it’s intriguing: what is it about Swift’s music that causes it to be singled out in this way?
 
At first glance, her fifth album doesn’t offer any obvious answers. 1989 has been widely boosted as being Swift’s first pure pop album, the record on which she finally divests herself of the last remaining musical vestiges of her roots as a teenage Nashville star. But that isn’t saying much, given that you’d have needed an electron microscope to detect any last remaining vestiges of those roots in its predecessor, Red. Much has been made of Swift as a self-contained singer-songwriter, but this time around the credits look pretty much the same as the credits for every big pop album: representatives from Scandanavian hit factories (Max Martin, Shellback); a moonlighting member of a mainstream indie-rock band (Fun’s Jack Antonoff); an EDM producer chancing their arm in the world of pop (Ali Payami); the omnipresent Greg Kurstin, of Lily Allen, Lana del Rey, Ellie Goulding and Kylie Minogue fame.
 
Given the cast list, you would expect 1989 to be an extremely polished product, which it undoubtedly is. Even its least interesting tracks sound like hits, which is what one pays Max Martin for: at its best, 1989 deals in undeniable melodies and huge, perfectly turned choruses and nagging hooks. Its sound is a lovingly done reboot of the kind of late 80s MTV pop-rock exemplified by Jane Wiedlin’s Rush Hour. It’s bold enough in its homage to take on one vintage sound thus far avoided by 80s revivalists – the booming, stadium-filling snare sound that all artists were legally obliged to use for the latter half of the decade makes a reappearance on I Wish You Would – but not so slavish as to preclude everything else: I Know Places is powered by drum’n’bass-influenced breakbeats; single Shake It Off pitches a My Sharona-ish beat against blaring hip-hop synths; the alternately pulsing and drifting electronics of Style and Clean mark 1989 out as an album made in the wake of Random Access Memories and Cliff Martinez’s 2011 soundtrack to Drive.
 
But the really striking thing about 1989 is how completely Taylor Swift dominates the album: Martin, Kurstin et al make umpteen highly polished pop records every year, but they’re seldom as clever or as sharp or as perfectly attuned as this, which suggests those qualities were brought to the project by the woman whose name is on the cover. As a songwriter, Swift has a keen grasp both of her audience and of pop history. She avoids the usual hollow platitudes about self-empowerment and meaningless aspirational guff about the VIP area in the club in favour of Springsteenesque narratives of escape and the kind of doomed romantic fatalism in which 60s girl groups dealt: the protagonists of I Know Places don’t end the song being pulled lifeless from a mangled car wreck, as they would have done had the Shangri-Las been in charge of proceedings, but they sound like they might, quite soon.
 
She also has a neat line in twisting cliches until they sound original. Shake It Off takes as its subject that great latterday pop bugbear, the haters, but avoids the usual line – the rather brittle insistence that their presence has somehow contributed to the artist’s inner strength – in favour of suggesting you just ignore them. If you were the kind of person wont to describe pop songs as “meta”, you could apply the term to How You Get the Girl, a knowing checklist of the kind of love-song platitudes that Swift’s peers might easily punt out with a straight face. If Wildest Dreams bears a hint of Lana del Ray, there’s something hugely cheering about the way Swift turns the persona of the pathetic female appendage snivelling over her bad-boy boyfriend on its head. Ramping up the melodrama by way of Be My Babyish drums, Wildest Dreams paints the man as the victim, doomed to spend the rest of his life haunted by what he’s carelessly lost.
 
“The drought was the very worst,” she sings at the outset of Clean. It’s not just that this is a pretty striking line with which to open a pop song, it’s that you can’t imagine any of Taylor Swift’s competitors coming up with anything remotely like it. Whether that’s because they couldn’t be bothered – you’d have to be hard of hearing to miss the distinct, depressing air of will-this-do? that currently runs through pop music – or because they just couldn’t is debatable. Either way, on 1989 the reasons she’s afforded the kind of respect denied to her peers are abundantly obvious.
 
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Taylor Swift, 1989, review: 'full of American fizz'
 
This is a tale of star-crossed celebrity lovers: America’s country sweetheart and British pop’s bad-boy Romeo. Taylor Swift has something of a reputation for writing pithy songs about her love life (ex-boyfriends John Mayer and Joe Jonas have been on the receiving end) and this time her subject matter is One Direction ladies man Harry Styles. In case listeners are in any doubt about the identity of the heartbreaker with the “James Dean daydream look” in his eye, she spells it out in a song cheekily titled Style, complete with an upbeat dance groove, a sound more associated with her ex’s manufactured boy band than her usual country power-pop.
 
To be fair, Swift has been moving away from Nashville for a while but on 1989 she goes the whole pop hog. The 24-year-old is quite capable of penning songs but this makeover has been concocted with the writer-producers who underpin the charts, including Max Martin (Britney Spears, Katy Perry), Ryan Tedder (Beyoncé, Adele) and Greg Kurstin (Lily Allen, Take That). You might think this would make her music more generic, but country pop is pretty formulaic as it is, so all she has really done is change points of reference, swapping Charley Pride for Charli XCX. Appropriately, for an album named after the year of Swift’s birth, the sound taps into a fad for the cheesy synths and sharp drum machines of the Eighties. There’s a wider range of dynamic contrast than you find on a lot of overproduced EMD hits but, none the less, the immediate impression is slick; candyfloss cheerleading, full of American fizz.
 
Scratch beneath the shiny surface, though, and Swift hasn’t moved so far from her roots. Amid the boom-clap drum patterns and digital hooks are songs that could conceivably be strummed on an acoustic guitar, with well-formed verses, rising bridges and catchy choruses. At the heart of country music is an engagement with the grit of real-life struggles, and this remains Swift’s lyrical terrain. Sharp observation and emotional engagement raise her material above the level of celebrity Twitter spat. They are not score-settling songs so much as emotional reckonings, revolving around the appeal and danger of reckless young love, with repeated motifs of memory and loss. The album ends with the understated, atmospheric Clean, a song of survival, evoking metaphors of the destructive yet cleansing force of a torrential storm but also breaking clean of an addiction. “You’re still all over me,” Swift mourns, “like a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore.” It’s not quite blood on the tracks, perhaps, but it’s got a truth and power rare in commercialised pop.
 
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Taylor Swift, 1989, album review: Pop star shows promising signs of maturity 
 
But whether it’s adolescent exaggeration or an attempt to bring more intriguing strategies into pop lyricism is debatable
 
On 1989, Taylor Swift’s world is a place of stark contrasts, sudden alterations and jarring images, its songs full of attempts to encapsulate dramatic emotional change in a few striking lines.
 
It’s an all-or-nothing, do-or-die place that perhaps seeks to buy into the Hunger Games worldview: “They are the hunters, we are the foxes,” she claims in “I Know Places”, while in “Out of the Woods”, she offers the evocative comparison of lovers’ colourful Polaroid lives with a world otherwise mired in monochrome.
 
For Swift, love is thrown into stark relief and shuts out the rest of the world, which lends a certain piquancy to the desperately inclusive electropop grooves and corporate rebel clichés of songs such as “Style” and “Blank Space”.
 
The best of these is “Shake  It Off”, a sing-song chant about players,  haters and fakers – coming to a playground  near you.
 
Produced mostly by Max Martin  and Shellback, the settings blend twitchy electro riffs with skeletal, scudding beats and understated guitar parts, with occasional details hinting at 1980s influences: the “O Superman”-style vocal pulse that introduces “How You Get the Girl”, or the “Vienna”-esque synth portents of “Out of the Woods”.
 
The latter is perhaps the most dramatically jarring song here, with its reference to a car accident requiring “20 stitches in a hospital room”, a theme taken up with her claim in the next track that “you drove us off the road”. It’s a weird, disjunctive clash of imagery, shocking naturalism followed by overstated metaphor.
 
Whether it’s adolescent exaggeration or an attempt to bring more intriguing strategies into pop lyricism is debatable.
 
But there’s certainly a new maturity evident in the closing track “Clean”, which finds Swift washing that man right out of her hair in wracked images of torment and turmoil, drought and drowning, and something more besides: “When the butterflies turned to dust, they covered my entire room” is surely the oddest line you’ll hear in pop for a long time.
 
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Taylor Swift 1989 album review: "Lighter, catchier and more calculated"
 
Billed variously as a reinvention, a rebirth and a career-redefining break from her country roots, Taylor Swift's 1989 is a risky prospect in a year where album sales are already at a record low. 
 
While reports of the album's pop focus were not exaggerated – there's barely a guitar to be heard among its 13 tracks – die-hard Swifties will be relieved to find that there are clear links back to her earthy ballads of old, with several tracks functioning almost as sequels to earlier songs. Swift has dubbed 1989 less boy-centric than her previous work, but there's no doubt that romance is still the primary focus. 
 
What's changed is her tone – in place of idealism and earnest heartache there is bite, and sass, and a savagely clear-eyed view of relationships that borders on fatalism. In 'Out of the Woods', the track that became a fan favourite upon its pre-release earlier this month, Swift sings: "We moved the furniture so we could dance / Baby, like we stood a chance", and this same sense of dread pervades every lyric about love.
 
One of Swift's earliest hits was the Romeo and Juliet-inflected 'Love Story', which described a fraught young romance that survives despite everything stacked against it. Here there's the similarly sweeping 'Wildest Dreams', an echoing epic-scale ballad with a drumbeat like a heartbeat, in which the same type of star-crossed affair is doomed from the outset and Swift asks only that the handsome-as-hell guy remember her after it ends.
 
As the opening lines of first single 'Shake It Off' proclaimed back in August, defiant self-awareness is key to Swift's reinvented sound – in sassy, smart-mouthed staccato track 'Blank Space' she plays off her unjustly acquired reputation as a serial dater, propositioning a new love interest with the offer to add his name to her "long list of ex-lovers". Boys are often bad news in Swift's songs but here she's the femme fatale, biting off lines like "Darling, I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream" with relish. We're a long way from Tim McGraw. 
 
Swift's plainly been hardened by the media siege around her personal life, and in contrast to the heart-on-sleeve confessions of Red, it's striking just how little of herself she reveals here. A representative early highlight is 'Style', a slick, knowingly shallow track about an unfaithful bad boy she just can't stay away from because they fit so timelessly well together: "You got that James Dean daydream look in your eyes / I got that red-lipped classic thing you like".
 
Given that Swift's relationship with Max Martin and Shellback has proved a failsafe formula for hits, it's unsurprising that they're front and centre on her first pop album, with co-writing credits on seven out of its 13 tracks. But chart-topping earworms like 'We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together' have historically been only one side of Swift's music, whereas here they dominate to the exclusion of more personal, lyrically sophisticated work: there is no 'All Too Well' to be found on 1989.
 
The closest thing might be 'Clean', Swift's first ever collaboration with Imogen Heap, which caps off the album on the intriguingly bittersweet note of feeling nothing but relief at the end of a relationship: "By morning gone was any trace of you / and I think I am finally clean". But even here, broad strokes replace the diary-like detail that made Swift's previous songs about relationships feel universal: instead of dancing around the kitchen in the refrigerator light, or crying in a party dress at her 21st birthday, she's being swept away by a metaphorical flood. 
 
There are points at which 1989 veers perilously close to pop-by-numbers: histrionic heartbreak ditty 'All You Had To Do Was Stay' could have been written and performed by just about anyone, while generic breathy ballad 'This Love' sounds like something crafted by the production line for a Nicholas Sparks movie adaptation. Even the much-touted 'Bad Blood', an energetically vicious diss track about a female musician who wronged Swift, feels like catty play-acting.
 
At its best, the album blends bubbly synth-pop with more intimate ideas. 'Out of the Woods' uses its repeated lyrics to evoke overwhelming anxiety and ruminative thoughts, while the similarly dark Ryan Tedder collaboration 'I Know Places' recalls 2010's 'Ours', with Swift reassuring a lover that they'll survive being relentlessly hounded by hiding out in foxholes. "Loose lips sink ships all the damn time," she sighs bitterly, and you know she means it. 
 
Even the anthemic bubblegum beats of 'Welcome to New York' get at something real; Swift's wide-eyed enchantment with the city feels genuine and relatable, in contrast to other tracks which lack even a glimmer of the personality on which her brand is built. 
 
1989 is a lighter, catchier and more calculated album than anything Swift has produced before, its slightness an occupational hazard of moving so firmly away from country. It's her least personal album to date, but it's also a technically accomplished goldmine of guaranteed hits, and if you look beyond the electro-layered vocals and endlessly looped choruses, you'll find that much of Swift's trademark emotional honesty remains. 
 
Tracks to download: 'Blank Space', 'Style', 'Out of the Woods', 'Wildest Dreams', 'I Know Places', 'Clean'
 
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ADRIAN THRILLS reviews singer's latest album 1989 (Big Machine)
Verdict: Goodbye Nashville, hello New York
 
Any lingering notions of Taylor Swift as a country artist are blown away by the U.S. superstar’s latest album. She might have been prompted to move to Nashville in her teens by the music of Faith Hill and the Dixie Chicks, but Swift has become a global phenomenon by reinventing herself as a whip smart pop performer.
 
The Red Tour, which visited the UK this year, was an arena blockbuster, while the two biggest hits from her last record, Trouble and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, were produced by Swedish maestro Max Martin, who pulls the creative strings for Katy Perry and Britney Spears.
 
Taylor’s fifth album, dominated by keyboards and throbbing electronics, rubber-stamps her move from cowgirl to pop princess. At a recent show, she scrawled some Bruce Springsteen lyrics on one arm — ‘we learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school’ — and 1989 keeps things sharp and succinct.
The album title refers to the year in which Swift was born, but it also hints at the late-Eighties influences that largely rule the roost here.
Her desire to change was inspired partly by her recent move away from Tennessee, and a more metropolitan approach is apparent on synth-driven opener Welcome To New York and current single Shake It Off. The latter finds Swift dismissing her ‘haters’ by channelling her inner Gwen Stefani against an irresistible backdrop of honking saxophone and playground-chant vocals.
 
Taylor’s songs have traditionally had an autobiographical streak, many inspired by ex-boyfriends such as John Mayer, Joe Jonas and Jake Gyllenhaal, all of whom have been on the receiving end of stinging rebukes. But she reveals very few intimate details here, preferring pithy one-liners.
 
On Blank Space, the not-so-squeaky-clean singer paints herself as a romantic predator — ‘I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream’ — while Out Of The Woods is a downhearted account of a fragile relationship, possibly her fling with One Direction’s Harry Styles.
Elsewhere, she uses the rock-orientated Bad Blood to survey the wreckage of a ‘now rusted’ friendship. Rumour has it that the song is about a squabble with Katy Perry.
 
She stumbles badly only once, sacrificing her strident individuality on Wildest Dreams, a cinematic torch song that comes across as a poor pastiche of Lana Del Rey’s Video Games. The tempo slows as the album progresses. There are fleeting glimpses of her country roots on the acoustic How You Get The Girl, although there are crunchy electronics even here. I Know Places is an old-school power ballad with modern, electronic twists.
 
There is, though, one last surprise in closing track Clean. Written by Swift and British singer Imogen Heap, it is a stripped-down but ambitious finale that nods towards Kate Bush.
 
Taylor has changed her outlook without resorting to the raunch favoured by so many of her contemporaries. Nashville might shudder, but its former sweetheart has boldly taken her talent to a new level.
 
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Album Review: Taylor Swift’s Pop Curveball Pays Off With ‘1989’

 

Any Nashville insider will tell you that Taylor Swift started breaking up with country music long before she first stepped out with hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback for three pop-leaning songs on 2012's blockbuster Red. But if her new single, "Shake It Off," was the official breakup letter, 1989 is the coming-out party, because it makes Red sound like Reba McEntire. Executive-produced by Swift and Martin, two of the all-time biggest hitmakers, the LP could have been an overstuffed Frankenstein of battling ideas. But instead it's Swift's best work -- a sophisticated pop tour de force that deserves to be as popular commercially as with Robyn-worshipping blog--gers; an album that finds Swift meeting Katy and Miley and Pink on their home turf and staring them down.
 
What's so different? Plenty. Sonically, 1989 is far more electronic than her previous work, driven by Martin's trademark drum programming and synthesizers, pulsating bass and processed backing vocals. The guitars, when they're there at all, deliver mostly texture; an acoustic is audible on just one song. The mandolins and violins were left back in Nashville, and there might not be a single live drum on the album. 
 
The songwriting is still unmistakably Swift, with her polysyllabic melodies and playful/-provocative lyrics. But Martin and other key collaborators (including Shellback, Ryan Tedder and fun.'s Jack Antonoff) have helped hone her songs, which are more seasoned and subtle, less bubbly and bratty, than in the past.
 
The self-referential change-of-scenery theme is set with the opening "Welcome to New York." Its new-wave hook and innocent lyrics -- "The lights are so bright, but they never blind me" -- make it the ideal anthem for an Anne Hathaway film, or any 24-year-old moving to the big city, as Swift recently has (albeit into a $20 million Tribeca penthouse).
 
From there, in signature Swift style, it's almost all love -- or at least relationship-based -- songs. Swift says she has hardly dated since splitting with One Direction's Harry Styles early in 2013, and the songs' musical styles follow the character types she plays on the album: train wreck waiting to happen ("Blank Space"), committed partner ("I Know Places," "This Love"), penitent breaker-upper ("I Wish You Would"), spurned break-upee ("All You Had to Do Was Stay"). Lyrical references to him are all over the album: There are several vehicular-mishap analogies (the pair were in a snowmobile accident in 2013) and even a song called "Style." But Swift has said the LP's most bitter song, "Bad Blood," a simplistic anthem of betrayal that sounds reminiscent of Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl," is directed not at an ex-lover but a shade-throwing female peer (consensus points to Katy Perry).
 
Surprisingly, the famous figure who gets the most elaborate attention is Lana Del Rey: Swift flat-out mimics her on "Wildest Dreams," flitting between a fluttery soprano and deadpan alto, flipping lyrics so Lana -- "His hands are in my hair, his clothes are in my room" -- that it's hard to tell if the song is homage or parody.
 
Swift saves the most unexpected pairing for the last, show-stopping cut on the album's standard edition (the Target version includes three bonus tracks, along with fascinating work-in-progress phone recordings of three songs). "Clean" is an aching, bittersweet team-up with esoteric British alt-popper Imogen Heap where Swift surrenders more to her collaborator than on any other song on the album. Its melody has more air and fewer syllables, and Heap's influence is obvious in the warm electronic setting and the lyrics, heavy on metaphors of drowning and addiction, and lines like "You're still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can't wear anymore." Swift's growing up, alright.
 
A clean break with the core audience is a risky move for any artist: At worst, it's like ill-advised plastic surgery, a blandifying of the distinctive qualities and quirks that made the person interesting in the first place. But Swift avoided that fate entirely with this album, making her rare ability to write for multiple audiences and ages even more universal. With 1989, she expertly sets up the next chapter of what is now even more likely to be a very long career.
 
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Taylor Swift - 1989 First Listen! Goodbye Country, Hello Pop!
We give our verdict on T-Swift's fifth studio album, and boy are you in for a treat…
 
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Taylor Swift began her career as a country singing 14-year-old, so it may come as a surprise that 10 years later she's produced what will no doubt be the pop album of the year.
 
Long gone are the days of cowboy boots and her Nashville twang, as the now 24-year-old proves she quite rightly deserves her seven Grammys with her long-awaited fifth studio album, 1989.
 
Her musical evolution is evident throughout, as her growth as both an artist and a woman bring with them a heavy keyboard and beat driven sound, attributes which were just waiting to jump out in 2012's Red.
 
Whether it's the heartbreak she's experienced as she navigates her way through the dating world in the limelight that her talent brings, or her becoming a modern day Carrie Bradshaw living in New York for the first time, something's clicked in her song writing, and we cannot get enough.
 
Album opener Welcome To New York sets the scene for the journey you embark upon when listening to the record, as Taylor sings: "Like any true love/ It drives you crazy/ But you know you wouldn’t change anything." While bouncy Blank Space proves Taylor is in on the joke of her media portrayal as a cougar/man-eater, who supposedly writes all her songs about ex-lovers.
 
Retro track Style hits you with a killer 70's groove, as well as the Jack Antonoff co-written Out Of The Woods which brings all the rumours to the yard.
 
All You Had to Do Was Stay will leave you feeling all emotional, as well as with a desperate need to know which ex-boyf (if any) this is about, with the lyrics: "This is what I wanted/ This is all you wanted/ But not like this". 
 
The track that began the hype back in August, Shake It Off, brings a welcome sense of relief as a mid-album opportunity to dance yourself silly, as its upbeat tempo will get your foot tapping even on the busiest of tubes.
 
I Wish You Would sees the co-production of Fun's Antonoff again, and paves the way for angriest song by far, Bad Blood, which is rumoured to be about her feud with Katy Perry, as she chants: "Sorry just for show".
 
The poetic Wildest Dreams hears a breathy, seductive Taylor sing: “I said ‘No one has to know what we do'/ His hands are in my hair/ His clothes are in my room.” While How You Get The Girl is also worth a listen, though sadly it's not about cute kittens like her recent ad might suggest. 
Mournful ballad This Love produced by Nathan Chapman proves that her man-hating days are long gone, replaced by a more mature way of thinking, as darkest track I Know Places hits the mark on the sophistication chart.
 
Having taken you on a journey of her relationship history, life changes and new way of thinking, album closer Clean, a chilling collaboration with Imogen Heap, is the perfect ending to the storybook that is 1989. 
 
With her name constantly in the headlines, Taylor Swift has proved she's over the rumours and whispering, as she tells her story from her perspective and takes you along for the ride too, without a country twang in sight.
 
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Taylor Swift: 1989
Rated 4 stars out of 5
 
Taylor Swift’s transformation from sweetheart of the rodeo to global pop superstar is complete. Any lingering rhinestones have been chiselled off. The former star of Nashville pop-country is now the fantasy elder sister to millions of girls the world over: cool but approachable, pretty but human. She has even been inviting fans over to her place for pizza. Whether a PR stunt or an act of beneficence, it sends out the same message: here is a pop star of the people.
 
Traces of country music could be found in Swift’s breakthrough album of 2012, Red, but all have been removed for 1989. It uses an Eighties-style disco-pop backing to soundtrack the lives of her young fans as they become teenagers: falling in love with and getting over boys, not caring about what the bullies say, finding your place in the world, having fun.
 
Swift’s masterstroke is to write songs that suggest diary-like intimacy, and fuel speculation over which famous former boyfriend might have inspired them, but are really designed to mirror the concerns of her fans and have little to do with the realities of her own life. She never sings about her vast wealth, the pressures of fame or her punishing work schedule. Instead, she sings Shake it Off, an irresistible slice of zinging pop that lists the things people say about her — that she’s vacuous, that she goes out on too many dates, that she can’t hold down a relationship — but which really offers a summation of teenage gossip and advice on dealing with the “haters”: to go out and have fun. In the video to Shake it Off she’s pitting herself as the goofy clown against a series of slick professional dancers, the message being that it doesn’t matter how good you are, just be yourself and you’ll be fine.
 
Shake it Off is the standout track on 1989, an album that fulfils its coming-of-age brief while veering between liveliness and blandness. Welcome to New York is a semi-futuristic electro-pop song about leaving home, coming to the big city for the first time and discovering a different, slightly scary reality while constructing a new personality to go with it. “Everybody here was someone else before,” says Swift, who recently moved to New York, before singing with wide-eyed wonder at the sight of “boys and boys and girls and girls”.
 
Out of the Woods is another example of Swift’s ability to weave apparent moments of revelation into a song with universal appeal. It’s presumed to be a commentary on her time with Harry Styles, but there was always something suspect about her relationship with the well-dressed, flamboyantly coiffed heart-throb from One Direction that makes lines like “We were lying on your couch, I remember” an exercise in counterfeit intimacy. Taylor claimed recently that it was “very sexist” for people (step forward, Olly Murs) to criticise her for writing about her exes when that’s exactly what her male equivalents like Ed Sheeran do, but Out of the Woods is ultimately a broad brush-stroke of a break-up song, its initial inspiration less important than its instant accessibility.
 
Swift is at her best when she’s poking fun at herself. On Blank Spaces she suggests her wholesome image is a cover for the jealous vixen within, singing “Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed as a daydream”, and on Style she admits her “good-girl thing” is never going to cut it with the fashion crowd. As is the way with huge American pop stars, however, she can fall all too quickly into overwhelming sincerity. This Love is a breathy and sentimental ballad that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Las Vegas casino, while on All You Had to Do Was Stay she screams the word “stay” with so much melodramatic passion, she sounds as though she might be in need of a restraining order. Other songs on the album are simply forgettable, but 1989 achieves its goal: to position Taylor Swift as the most popular girl-next-door on the planet. (Virgin EMI, out Mon) 
 
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Album Review: 1989
Rated 4 Stars out of 5
 
When Taylor Swift decides to do something, the girl really knows how to overdo it. So on her fifth album, when she indulges her crush on Eighties synth-pop, she goes full blast, spending most of the album trying to turn herself into the Pet Shop Boys. 1989 is a drastic departure – only a couple of tracks feature her trademark tear-stained guitar. But she's still Taylor Swift, which means she's dreaming bigger and oversharing louder than anyone else in the game. And she still has way too many feelings for the kind of dudes who probably can't even spell "feelings."
 
Swift has already written enough great songs for two or three careers. Red, from 2012, was her Purple Rain, a sprawling I-am-the-cosmos epic with disco banjos and piano ballads and dubstep drops. But as every Eighties pop star knew, you don't follow one epic with another – instead, you surprise everybody with a quick-change experiment. So rather than trying to duplicate the wide reach of Red, she focuses on one aspect of her sound for a whole album – a very Prince thing to do.
 
Max Martin produced seven of these 13 songs, and his beats provide the Saturday-night-whatever soundtrack as Swift sings about the single life in the big old city she always dreamed about. In "Welcome to New York," she finds herself in a place where "you can want who you want/Boys and boys, and girls and girls." She hits cruise mode on the floor in "Blank Space" ("I can make the bad guys good for the weekend") and the hilariously titled "Style," where she swoons, "You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye."
 
The best moments come toward the end, when Swift shakes up the concept. "How You Get the Girl" mixes up the best of her old and new tricks, as she strums an acoustic guitar aggressively over Martin's expert disco surge. "This Love" brings back her most simpatico producer, Nathan Chapman, for the kind of tune that they were just starting to call a "power ballad" in 1989. (The precise equivalent would be Bon Jovi's "I'll Be There for You.") On the killer finale, "Clean," English singer Imogen Heap adds ethereal backup sighs to Swift's electro melancholy ("You're still all over me like a wine-stained dress I can't wear anymore").
 
If there's nothing as grandiose as "All Too Well" or "Dear John" or "Enchanted," that's because there wasn't meant to be. 1989 sets the record for fewest adjectives (and lowest romantic body count) on a Swift album. Most of the songs hover above the three-minute mark, which is a challenge for Tay – she's always been a songwriter who can spend five minutes singing about a freaking scarf and still make every line hit like a haymaker. But if you're into math, note that the three best songs here – "How You Get the Girl," "This Love," "Clean" – are the three that crash past four minutes. This is still an artist who likes to let it rip. Deeply weird, feverishly emotional, wildly enthusiastic, 1989 sounds exactly like Taylor Swift, even when it sounds like nothing she's ever tried before. And yes, she takes it to extremes. Are you surprised? This is Taylor Swift, remember? Extremes are where she starts out.
 
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1,989 words on the new Taylor Swift album
 
On ‘1989’’s opening track ‘Welcome To New York’, Taylor Swift sings of “searching for a sound we hadn’t heard before”. To many of her younger fans this albums 80sisms – more subtle, it turns out, than initially hinted – might well be a fresh sound, but Taylor Swift has cultivated and earned a fanbase that extends far beyond teenagers. ‘1989’’s sound will not represent an unheard musical palette for the over-35s who actually lived through it, or those in their twenties who’ve already been through one 80s revival. Whatever the frame of reference, a huge proportion of this album situates itself outside the sounds that dominate Top 40 radio on either side of the Atlantic, just as Taylor has nurtured a popstar persona that contrasts with the public images put forward by most of her peers.
 
Sonic landscape aside, the vital element in the brilliance of ‘1989’ is that the songwriting is of a phenomenally high standard. As well as being expertly written the majority of these songs are also skilfully structured – ‘1989’ is an album of great post-choruses and great middle eights accompanying the expected barrage of extraordinary choruses. Repetition is used sparingly, repetition is used knowingly, repetition is used to great effect. ‘1989’ is the sound of a popstar whose powers are scaling new heights finding the perfect executive producer in the shape of Max Martin, whose formidable talents are going at full throttle on a number of these songs. Ultimately, there’s a clarity of vision that’s virtually unrivalled in the current pop scene.
 
Fans of Taylor’s earlier work complain that this former country singer (was she ever, really, an actual country singer?) now makes electronic pop music ‘like everybody else’. The truth is, nobody else is making electronic pop music quite like this.
 
There are incredibly few artists who could carry off at least three quarters of this album. Ironically, given the presence of much-discussed beef bonanza ‘Bad Blood’, one of the few albums on which some of these songs would fit is Katy Perry’s ‘Prism’, an album that flirted with full-on pensivepop via songs like ‘Double Rainbow’, but bottled it and found it necessary to counteract that elegant sophistication with too many tracks like ‘Birthday’ and ‘This Is How We Do’. ‘1989’ isn’t full-on pensivepop either – ‘Bad Blood’ and ‘Shake It Off’ stand out a mile – but it still feels like a body of work in the same way classic Madonna albums always did.
 
The supposed 80s sound, by the way, is a slight red herring – there are references to the likes of OMD but Taylor hasn’t exactly stormed along with an album that sounds like T’Pau and Bucks Fizz. Still, the synths soar, the drum machines patter along and the powerful melodies are old-fashioned in the best possible way at a point in pop history when traditional songwriting has, largely, been barged aside by tracks built around hooks and little else.
 
In any case the 80s references that do underpin the album never overwhelm: this isn’t pastiche, songs such as ‘I Know Places’ and ‘I Wish You Would’ sound really fresh, and there’s a strong influence of Joel Little’s work with Lorde on the likes of ‘Blank Space’ and ‘Bad Blood’.
 
The edges of that Lorde sound are smoothed off, just as ‘Out Of The Woods’ feels like Chvrches fed through the pop machine. But Taylor Swift is in the business is making Actual Pop, and smoothed edges come with the territory. Actual Pop is a metagenre whose gravitational pull reels in everything from orbiting genres and does whatever the hell it likes with the raw materials. That is why it’s amazing. Critics might identify the resulting music as a watered down sound. Actually – if we’re going to run with the watered down idea and situate this whole metaphor in the kitchen – it’s a reduced down sound. To put it another way, it’s pop stock.
 
The base ingredient for most pop from the last seventy years is Stuff About Love. Stuff About Love is simply the default lyrical setting for most chart music. Obviously there are hits that are all about going out and dancing around on a table, and there are hits about how amazing the singer is at everything they do or how the haters are going to hate, and you’ll occasionally find hits that completely bash down all the boundaries and discuss something totally different. But Stuff About Love is what pop is all about. For this reason – because almost everyone sings about love, and has done for the best part of the century – finding a new way to talk about it is the Holy Grail of pop songwriting. It’s tough, but there are several moments on ‘1989’ when Taylor completely hits the spot. ‘Out Of The Woods’ is just one song that feels like it innovates in this area, or at least takes a look at love from a new perspective.
 
Equally the desolate and jarring ‘Clean’ takes a brutal look at the part of a relationship where everything’s gone tits up. “The drought was the very worst,” Taylor sings, “when the flowers that we’d grown together died of thirst … The rain came pouring down, I punched a hole in the roof, let the flood carry away all my pictures of you … When I was drowning that’s when I could finally breathe.” The song wrings dry the dead horse of mixed metaphor by adding that the cleanliness felt in the wake of this watery scenario is a bit like being clean following a spell in rehab (“ten months sober, ten months older, now that I’m clean, I’m not gonna risk it”) but the song’s a belter nonetheless.
 
The album’s centrepiece – to these ears, anyway – is ‘Style’, a track for which iTunes’ single song repeat function could well have been invented. There’s a great detail in the middle eight when Taylor sings “I heard that you’ve been out with some other girl”, then admits, “I’ve been there too a few times”. As jolting middle eight turnarounds go, this is a plot twist right up there with The Human League’s ‘Human’.
 
Stuff About Love often feels so bland because lyricists dilute and blur their experiences in an attempt to make them relatable to every listener. Actually, as Taylor Swift proves on ‘1989’, the best way to conjure the true feeling of love in the listener’s mind is to describe one’s own experience of romance in such specific terms that it reminds the listener of their own private moments. This is why lines like “we moved the furniture so we could dance” on ‘Out Of The Woods’ and “it’s 2am in your car” work so well.
 
Studies of lying show that when telling a lie, most people are tempted to add a huge amount of detail to their stories; they believe that the more detail they add, the more believable their stories will be. ‘1989’ does not feel dishonest, but you could argue that the suggested extent of this album’s intimacy is an illusion of sorts, or at least an example of sleight of hand.
 
In media training, artists are often advised that the best way to avoid difficult personal questions is to pre-emptively offer up personal information. Divulging personal information whose boundaries you’ve defined allows the interviewer or reader to feel like their thirst for hot gossip has been quenched, so they move away to a different area. In order to do this effectively you must compartmentalise your personal life into areas that seem off-limits and those that actually are off-limits. And that in a sense – probably instinctively, rather than as the result of media training – is what we have with Taylor Swift. You end ‘1989’ feeling like you know what it’s like to be in a relationship with Taylor Swift, and maybe one or two other popstars to boot. In fact, we know none of the ‘interesting’ stuff – all that nonsense that would crash the servers of most gossip websites. But we feel like we know enough.
 
Nowhere is this perceived intimacy as well-honed as in ‘I Know Places’, a song about hunters and foxes, which promises “I know places we won’t be found”. Once ensconced in these places, the couple in the song will leave the hunters “chasing the their tails trying to track us down”. On first listen this seems to be a song about photographers, but given the circumstances of the relationships covered by this album the song could just as easily be about attempts to escape the glare of two different sets of fans.
 
In 2014 fans are a paparazzi swarm in their own right; Taylor herself recently wrote that these days fans just want pictures instead of autographs. But then nobody else understands 21st Century pop fame the way Taylor does, or if they do, they don’t demonstrate that understanding like Taylor does. The ‘Shake It Off’ video was either too clever for its own good or too dumb for its own good, or perhaps a combination of the two. Either way it misfired, but at its heart it was a shrewd way of Taylor recognising – then owning – the pop space she occupies.
 
Does she occupy that space by accident? Does she bollocks. Nothing about this album or Taylor’s career seems left to chance. That’s not to say this album feels stilted. On the contrary, she seems to have fun with the space she’s in. In ‘Blank Space’ – as in the opening lines of ‘Shake It Off’ – she plays on the way she’s caricatured. With lines like “hey, let’s be friends, I can’t wait to see how this one ends”, “oh my God, look at that face, you look like my next mistake” and “I’ve got a blank space baby, and I’ll write your name” she seems to be singing from the perspective of the woman she’s made out to be, satirising the snark cloud that hovers above her public image.
 
That caricature is one she might not encourage, but she certainly does little to dispel it. Naturally, that’s to her own advantage – all fame is about caricature, and just like she’s managed the private details she wants the world to know, Taylor’s effectively defines her own caricature, nominating the parts of her personality she permits to be exaggerated.
 
Waffle aside, there are loads of top tunes here. ’1989’ feels effortlessly enchanting, and of course, it’s not effortless at all – this is a laser-guided pop – but there’s a feeling of relaxed charm to most of these songs, and it’s a feeling many artists find hard to engineer. Taylor pulls it off. This is not a perfect album, but it does contains enough perfect songs (three) plus enough 9/10s (three) and few enough sub-5/10s (none) to make it the best album of the 2014, not to mention the best of Taylor’s career.
 
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Taylor Swift’s ’1989′: 3 Highlights To Watch Out For
 
Perhaps you’ve seen rumblings on Twitter, on the Internet or merely felt the vibrations coursing through the streets, but Taylor Swift‘s new album, 1989, may or may not have hit the web a little early.
 
To be fair, we’d already heard a bunch of new tunes leading up to the album’s eventual arrival, including her #1 smash “Shake It Off,” “Out Of The Woods” and “Welcome To New York,” as well as a hint of “Style.” But what else is there to look forward to? Let’s discuss.
 
 
1.) “Blank Space”
 
Click. Taylor’s a nightmare dressed as a daydream, and she’s got her songwriting pen ready for this obvious reflection on the media’s portrayal of Tay as a man-eater. “Got a long list of ex-lovers, they’ll tell you I’m insane/But I got a blank space baby…and I’ll write your name,” she brightly sings above the chant-ready chorus. The tripping beats bounce as hard as the hearts she breaks. Care to be the next name on her list?
 
 
2.) “All You Had To Do Was Stay”
 
Big, big, big! Taylor serves up an irresistibly catchy, dreamy chorus that builds in a way that recalls St. Lucia “All Eyes On You.” “Hey, all you had to do was…stay!” she repeats along the synth-pop pulsations. When Tay said she was navigating into a “late ’80′s”-inspired pop space, this song is exactly what she was (probably) talking about. Luckily, it’s huge — and an equally huge sigh of relief for fans.
 
 
3.) “Bad Blood”
 
Of all the songs that’ll “get ‘em talking,” this is perhaps the one that’ll get them the most talking. Why? Because it’s about Katy Perry, maybe, which means that Swifties and Katy Cats will be tearing apart the song, lyric by lyric. Armed with a big chant (‘Cause baby, now we got bad blood/You know, we used to be mad love”), the ominous cut sees Tay at her most vicious. And while it might have been inspired by some backing dancer business, it can apply to any double-crossing situation. “Band-Aids don’t fix bullet holes, you say sorry just for show/If you live like that, you live with ghosts,” she tenderly tip-toes across the bridge. A Prism reference? Conspiracy theory away, y’all!
 
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I LISTENED TO THE NEW TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM BEFORE YOU DID
By Sam Wolfson
 
A couple of weeks ago, I shuffled into a conference room with some other music journalists. For about 20 minutes we sat facing each other in total silence, staring each other out. Then, we each put on a pair of headphones, and they pressed play on Taylor Swift’s new album, 1989.
 
With each passing Taylor album she has drifted further away from twangy FM radio ballads and closer towards the top tier of global pop. This is mostly a good thing: her songs have become richer, her personality more defined, her production stadium-filling and world-class. Red, her last album, felt like the perfect balance of sheen and progression, while retaining an element of twang that defined her early career. Best of all, it shook off the innocense and naivaté of her early career and showed a fully-formed adult human. Part of that was freeing herself from the confines of mainstream country and embracing the notion that, yes, Swift was one of the biggest stars in pop, and should make a record that reflected that. It follows that this record, which has been pitched to Swift's fans as her first "non-country" album, would allow her to sound bigger and better than ever.
 
But it’s also cause for concern. To me, the best moments on the last two Taylor albums haven't been the big chart-topping pop slayers, but those slightly-corny country moments. It’s as though she was learning all these new skills to become a full-blown popstar, but it’s when she chucks out a quick country number on the fourth single to keep the red states happy, that her hard work and expertise really shined. 
 
That’s why, as good as “Mine” is, it’s not as good as “Mean”: a song in which Taylor Swift plays a massive banjo and calls someone a prick. It’s also why “We Are Never Getting Back Together” doesn’t have a patch on “I Almost Do”: a super soppy ballad about wanting to call an ex after a break-up. Would 1989 prove that country was a necessary constraint to help guide Swift's creativity? Or could jettisoning the banjos and fiddles allow her to truly spread her wings?
 
So anyway, we were only allowed to listen to the record once and had to make our notes there and then. I scrawled across two bits of paper manically. Those bits of paper are all I have to refer to now as I write this.
 
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Here are some things I’ve learned
 
- I can now say, objectively, that “Shake It Off” is the sixth best song on the Taylor Swift album.
 
- My note on “How You Get The Girl” simply says “DIDN’T WRITE MUCH ABOUT THIS ONE BECAUSE IT’S SO LEGIT. THE "BOUND" 2 OF THE TAYLOR ALBUM. 1 4 THE HEADS” so that’s good.
 
- There is, I think, a real life swear word on this record. It is fuck. Could this be the first Taylor album to be marked as Explicit on iTunes? Or am I just misreading my notes?
 
- I’m like 98% sure that “I Know Places” is written from the perspective of Carrie Mathison in the first two series of Homeland. Seriously the whole vibe is “I know places we can hide”, “loose lips sink ships” and “they’re trying to track us down.” I need to listen to it again but I'm pretty sure there's stuff about fleeing the country while being chased too. Although I just googled to see if Taylor has ever spoken about Homeland before though and all I could find was this meme:
 
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There are a few big "statement" tracks on the record that really seek to undermine the public perception which she may have played up to in the past. “Blank Space” is a swinging response to the idea that she falls in and out of love all the time. In it, she is basically saying, "Don’t put your shit on me." It’s about boys who only want love if it’s torture, who long for the pain of pining. There’s a great campy line in it, when she’s talking about how she lures them in: “Darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a dream”—which is her basically saying, "You want the drama and I sure know how to give it to you, but it’s only you who can’t handle the heartbreak." In essence, she's hinting that she actually quite likes a good break-up.
 
“Style” swings in the opposite direction from “We Are Never Getting Back Together.” It’s a song about how you can’t fucking escape this relationship, even if you wanted to. “We never go out of style, we’ll come back every time,” she says to an unnamed boy who seems to be under the misapprehension that it’s over. As on the previous track, it seems like she isn’t so involved in the heat of the emotional moment, but focusing more on the long game. On “Out Of The Woods” she’s basically doing the same thing in a slightly more panicked manner, rather than trying to judge someone by each little thing they do, she just wants answers: WHERE IS THIS GOING? ARE WE A THING OR NOT?
 
I know some people were a bit concerned after hearing “Welcome to New York,” because it sounds like the song a Time Square hostel might use on their poorly edited YouTube ad. The good news is it’s probably the weakest track on the record. There are few other bum notes dotted around though, particularly how much she talks about being a “good girl” (including moderately risqué line that she’s a “got that good girl faith and a tight little skirt.”). 
 
This isn’t quite a party record, and it’s not really a falling in love record either. Even the boys mentioned on the album feel like bit players. This is much more of a one-woman show. For example, on “All You Had to Do Was Stay,” she tells a story we’ve all seen happen: boy gets too big for his boots, thinks he can do better than his girlfriend. Dumps girlfriend. Then comes back a shrivelling, weeping mess two weeks later, begging for her back. This track is Taylor saying you had your chance and you fucked it up, buddy.
 
It is, undoubtedly, a glistening pop album with superproducer Max Martin's kitchen-sink production on most of the tracks and nothing you could really call country, except for the final ballad “Clean.” But my fears about it becoming too polished were entirely allayed by the two best tracks: “I Wish You Would” and “Wildest Dreams.” Both of these songs demonstrate that however big Taylor gets, she’s still going to do her. In the former, she's full of regret and loneliness, tied up in knots about something that happened weeks ago. It’s pretty perfect and the only song I can still sing three weeks later having only heard it once. The latter almost sounds quite Kate Bush and has Taylor singing: “Say you’ll remember me, standing there in a nice dress.” Only Taylor Swift could pull off such a brilliant non-description and have it make perfect sense.
 
For all the bombast of its release, 1989 is a straightforward pop record. There are no big collaborations or wild shifts in genre. I guess you could say it’s her most pop album ever, but I would say that in this day and age writing big adventurous pop music is almost riskier than scribing ten country ballads. What I love most is how ridiculous it would sound if anyone else had recorded it. Yes, it’s a record about growing up and being less under the spell of boys. But it’s also cements a very clear idea of who Taylor Swift is. She’s made the hardest maneuver of all, from the travelator of child stardom, to grown up pop star, and into that separate plane of knowable human being. When Beyonce songs about the power of women or Kanye says something obscene about oral sex and an ancient civilizations, it’s almost unsurprising, because those things are part of our public perception of them. I think you could now say the same of Taylor, standing there, in her nice dress, being Taylor.
 
But I could probably do with a few more listens before we say anything too brash tbf and tbh, so let’s just say come back to Noisey for more, OK?
 
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Taylor Swift’s 1989 Reviewed—All Tracks Rated For Greatness
 
*DISCLAIMER– AS SOMEONE WHO SPENDS 2 YEARS LISTENING TO EACH TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM CONSISTENTLY GETTING NEW STUFF OUT OF IT EACH TIME, THE FOLLOWING ARE MY *FIRST IMPRESSIONS* AND DO NOT REFLECT MY END OPINIONS OF 1989. MY OPINIONS WILL PROBABLY CHANGE 10000X MORE TIMES. AND FOR YOU CRAZY SWIFTIES WHO ARE GOING TO HATE MY MORE NEGATIVE OPINIONS — JUST KNOW I AM ONE OF YOU.
 
RATING SCALE 1-10 TEN BEING THE BEST OBVIOUSLY (1=Girl At Home, 10=All Too Well)
 
 
1. Welcome To New York - I don’t know about this song, I just don’t know. This song drives me up the wall for a variety of reasons (It simply does not evoke any New York feelings in me at all, and can people please stop trying to tell everyone about their NYC love story? No one cares that NYC makes you feel happy and excited) but I get why Tay put it as number 1 on 1989. She’s just trying to usher in a *new era* of herself and we all know Tay is big on grandly obvious statement making. 3/10
 
2. Blank Space - What a fun song that sounds like it could have been on 1990s alt radio if it didn’t have those drums playing in the back! It’s smart and self-aware in a way that isn’t obnoxious. “I can make the bad guys good for a weekend” is a great lyric, cuz I believe her. Actually, maybe this song is amazing. 8/10
 
3. Style - YEAAAHHH this makes me want to watch Grease right now. Immediately see montage in my head of a Danny Zucko looking dude cruising down Highway 1 taking his RayBans either on or off. Also makes me think that Tay and Harry Styles were not as bad of a couple as I thought they were at the time. This part– “I say I heard that you’ve been out and about with some other girl/some other girl/he says what you heard is true but I/ can’t stop thinking about you”– gives me chills because I am corny, duh. This song is good. 8/10
 
4. Out of the Woods - Blah, can’t get behind this song, sorry guys. Weak lyrics forced into a track that Jack Antonoff thinks is the greatest thing he has ever done. I actually don’t even want to talk about it cuz it bums me out, so let’s just move on to the next track. Maybe at some point over the next two years of the 1989 era I will retract these feelings but I don’t know. 1/10 (Unfair rating but I can’t take this song seriously- it’s Jack Antonoff’s fault not mine)
 
5. All You Had To Do Was Stay -  I feel very conned that this is our “Track 5″ for 1989. Track 5 is usually Tay’s most *heartfelt* songs—Cold As You, White Horse, Dear John, the epic All Too Well, for those of you not in the know. It’s usually the one that makes you cry. The first time I listened to this song I dismissed it entirely but now I’m listening to it a second time and I don’t hate it. I love the hysterical “STAAAAY” in the chorus. 6/10
 
6. Shake It Off - This song fits in well with the album, more than OOTW, IMHO. Perfect track 6. 8/10
 
7. I Wish You Would - THIS SONG IS A PARTY and is definitely the “I Knew You Were Trouble” of 1989. That chorus reminds me of some other song I can’t quite place but it might be a damn Drake song to be honest. Does anyone know what I’m talking about? Anyway, this album does a great job of staying above musical trends, but this song definitely sounds very 2014 and not 1989. HEH HEH. It’s fun though. Obviously. All of these are fun. 8/10
 
8. Bad Blood - One thing Tay cannot / will not ever stop doing is assuming what other people (John Mayer, Kanye West, Jake Gyllenhaal) are thinking and why they react to her in the way that they react. This song is fine, when she says “mad love” I can’t help but chortle (yea, chortle), but what the heck Tay? Why did you write a Katy Perry shame song? IMHO this song is no better than Better Than Revenge.. 4/10
 
9. Wildest Dreams - I’m listening to this and my roommate immediately is like “This is so Lana Del Rey.” Ugh, it’s so true. This could be a LDR song and maybe be better. Also refers to herself as “standing in a nice dress.” What the hell does a nice dress look like? The bridge of this song is fun and weird enough I guess. Blarg. 5/10
 
10. How You Get The Girl - Lyrically this song is pretty great at meaning exactly what it’s saying. It is a relief that Tay has learned something about herself and what she wants from relationships. This song is way 80s and reminds me of Pat Benetar. I wish I had more 80s references to work with. 8/10
 
11. This Love - Yesssss this totally sounds like The Cranberries and I love it. It’s so breathy and power-ballady without being too much. Gorgeous gorgeous gorgeous thanks Tay. 9/10
 
12. I Know Places - Wow, you know that photo of Taylor with Conor Kennedy in RI when they’re on the beach trying to get away from the paparazzi and she’s in a hilarious looking mid-run? That picture cracks me up. This is like the musical version of that photo. It an anthem about paranoia, essentially- I can imagine a giant swarm of paparazzi jumping up behind Tay and Conor as they try to enjoy sparkling lemonade on the beach. Actually this song is kinda funny, I dunno. 6/10
 
 
13. Clean - GOD I love this song, I can see this on 90s alt radio no problem, nobody would know the difference. It could also have been on “Red” to be honest. Now that I think about it, Red was pretty 90s alt radio-friendly. Who does this sound like? I like when she says she punched a hole in the roof. I hope she actually did that. Maybe this is the “All Too Well” of this album in terms of processing a relationship that has recently ended? Except this time she’s forgiving and sew clean. 8/10
 
14. Wonderland - “Life was never worse but never better” GREAT LYRIC TAY, I FEEL THAT. But then you go and reference  Harry Style’s “cheshire cat smile” which is the lamest thing you could possibly say, especially in a song about “Wonderland.” Whatever. This song is catchy. In terms of corniness it’s at Starlight level but that’s okay. 7/10
 
15. You R In Love - BEAUTIFUL AND CUTE and takes me back to the Self Titled/Fearless days. Makes me feel the way that “Hey Stephen” or “Stay Beautiful” makes me feel. It does sort of feel like you’re inside of a snow globe and paper snowflakes that Taylor hand cut herself are falling around you, except it’s warm inside of the snow globe. “You understand now why they lost their minds and fought the wars / and why I’ve spent my whole life trying to put it into words” makes me DIE, OMG, DEAD, in a good way. 9/10
 
16. New Romance - This song ROCKSSSSS. I can’t even understand how to process it because it is so different than the rest of the album. Lady GaGa wishes all of Artpop sounded like this. “Please take my hand and please take me dancing and / please leave me stranded / it’s so romantic” = KILLER LYRIC TAYTAY U GO. 9/10
 
Overall feelings - I was really ready, after Shake it Off, Out Of The Woods, and Welcome To New York, to swear off Tay fandom, but TBH I can’t because this is not just a pop album, it’s a Taylor Swift album, she delivered, thank the Lord.
 
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Some Snap Judgments on Taylor Swift’s 1989
 

Taylor Swift is calling 1989 her first official pop album, and like all pop albums do (except for one), it's leaked ahead of its official release. Here's a quick rundown of what you can look forward to. Good news: What you haven't heard just yet is sounding a lot better than what you have.
 
 
"Welcome to New York"
In context, this is not actually the worst song of Swift's career. It's just a lightweight intro (and so much more fun if you pretend it's about Ebola).
 
"Blank Space"
Think Rosamund Pike at the end of Gone Girl — "Darling, I'm a nightmare, dressed like a daydream." Actually, on second thought, how did they not cross-promo this?
 
"Style"
Good news: It's not actually eight seconds of white noise. It's more like Miami Vice, or maybe Drive: "You got that James Dean daydream look in your eye / And I got the red-lip classic thing that you like."
 
"Out of the Woods"
Final count: 40 "out of the woods"s, 36 "in the clear"s. This is the jam.
 
"All You Had to Do Was Stay"
Lyrically, this is a Red throwback — some lousy ex wants to get back together, and Taylor's having none of it. There's a shrieking falsetto "Stay!" that is just begging to be replaced with animal noises.
 
"Shake It Off"
This one's grown on us, probably from sheer repetition. Shame-shame-shame about the spoken-word part, though.
 
"I Wish You Would"
Taylor's apology songs never have as much bite as the rest of her breakup songs, and this one's no different. Has "beige" been completely supplanted by "basic"? This song is very beige.
 
"Bad Blood"
Here’s your hit piece, a song as mean (and catchy!) as promised. Just in case you weren’t sure it was Katy Perry, there’s a telling reference to Perry's song "Ghost" (off this year’s Prism).
 
"Wildest Dreams"
If you’ve read the reviews so far, you’ll recall critics mentioning a track that sounds like a spot-on Lana Del Rey impression. Turns out, that is exactly right: "Wildest Dreams" is the dreamy song that proves that Taylor definitely bought Ultraviolence. 
 
"How You Get the Girl"
Oh, damn, Taylor’s a PUA now? For all you friend-zoned dudes ("Remind me how it used to be / Pictures in frames of kisses on cheeks"), here’s how you get the girl: "Say it’s been a long six months / And you were too afraid to tell her what you want, want." And that’s how it works! That’s how you get the girl! (Seriously, though, this isn’t awful advice. Be honest, guys.) 
 
"This Love"
A ballad! "This Love" is an ode to letting your man go and letting him to back to you. Right? Sometimes that works, I guess.
 
"I Know Places"
Did Lorde decide not to pick her BFF Taylor’s "I Know Places" for her carefully curated Mockingjay soundtrack? Because this one sounds more Hunger Games than ever. 
 
"Clean"
"Let the rain fall down and wake my dreams. Let it wash away my sanity." Just kidding, those are lyrics to Hilary Duff’s "Come Clean," a song that sounds nothing like "Clean," which sounds more like Imogen Heap (and just happens to also have her backing vocals).
 
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TAYLOR SWIFT ‘1989’ ALBUM REVIEW: PLENTY OF POP, BUT NOT MUCH PUNCH
We are never, ever, ever getting back together.
 
The lines of Taylor Swift’s now-classic lead single could very well have doubled for the press release for her latest album, 1989, in which she declared she was abandoning her country-pop roots in favor of pure pop, a move both lamented and lauded by her contemporaries and critics. 1989, therefore, has a lot to live up to.
 
Swift has carved herself a niche in the pop landscape; combining brutally honest emotional storytelling, with sugary pop hooks and choruses lesser artists would sell their souls for. Whatever your opinion of her public dating life, it cannot be denied that the artist is a huge global success.
 
As such, to say 1989 is an album of undeniable highs and lows is a bit of an understatement, although its nature as a love letter to the ’80s – and the eponymous year of Swift’s birth – remains untarnished.
 
Sadly, a lot of Swift’s pop star prowess has been lost, in a way, to moving away from the romantic idyll in which she produces her best work. That isn’t to say that the more ‘independent’ songs are duds — far from it. Album opener ‘Welcome to New York’ is a midtempo anthem to the Big Apple, and one that will surely be on every NYC-based film’s soundtrack in the next twelve months, while lead single ‘Shake It Off’ is a rousing ode to removing your cares from a bad situation. Further along, tunes such as the romantic ‘Style’, the enjoyable ‘How You Get The Girl’, and the catchy bonus track ‘Wonderland’ are pleasant enough ear candy for any pop fan.
 
However, some of the songs come off better than others — ‘Bad Blood’, a snappy breakup anthem (supposedly a metaphor for her ‘feud’ with fellow pop star Katy Perry), fares well enough, but too many of the ballads (‘Blank Space’ and ‘You R In Love', for example) become soggy and lose any chance to standing out. Thankfully, buzz single ‘Out of the Woods’ (co-written and produced with fun.’s Jack Antonoff) is head and shoulders above the rest, combining massive drums and ethereal vocals to create a power ballad worthy of the decade that inspired the album’s name, and worthy of the ensuing fan reaction.
 
Sonically, Swift may well have gone fully to the side of pop, but her adventurousness here pales a little in comparison to the leaps made by predecessor ‘Red’ which infused pop, gospel and dubstep into proceedings. Fortunately one of the best is album closer ‘Clean’, the highly-anticipated collaboration with indie songstress Imogen Heap — which is something that thrills this reviewer. ‘Clean’ is a sparkling, offbeat electronic ode that fuses Heap’s creative spark with Swift’s gift for writing a damn good, emotional pop song. Clearly a full collaboration album needs to happen somewhere down the line.
 
All in all, 1989 is, ironically, the epitome of a modern pop album. Full of sheen and sparkle and reverence for the ’80s, it dazzles with its brilliance and highs, and meanders in its lows. Swift is a talented pop star, and when she strikes the balance between heartfelt lyricism and addictive pop goodness, she’s more than worth the price of admission. Is it quite the album a lot of us were expecting? Perhaps not. However, given that this is an album that is Swift’s first dip into pure pop, it can be forgiven – particularly when the feeling that Swift has only just begun her journey, is undeniable…
 
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