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Discussion: Taylor Swift - 'RED' | Metascore: 77/100
Member Since: 6/16/2006
Posts: 6,439
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Originally posted by alkralkra
RYM.  that site is a piece of ****. |
how so?
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Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 12,849
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Quote:
Originally posted by alkralkra
RYM. that site is a piece of ****. |
Girl, let's not.  Which site you stan for btw?
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Member Since: 6/22/2011
Posts: 3,959
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Consequence of Sound
The wide-reaching, massive ambitions of Taylor Swift’s latest album, Red, should come as no surprise. Swift’s career and her music have been headed towards full-fledged crossover success for some time, and to take issue with some of the more transparent pop concessions on Red is to have missed the point, to have been grasping onto a Nashville authenticity years after Swift’s tossed such strict conventions aside. Folkies threw a fit when Dylan went electric, but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t been warning them all along.
It would be easier to take issue with Red’s glaring crossover aspirations if Swift’s full-fledged pop experimentations didn’t fit so well, if they truly were concessions. On Red, the 22-year-old songwriter tries on many masks. She shocks with dubstep drops, flirts with U2 pastiche, and, with help from pop mastermind Max Martin, channels Ke$ha and takes on the dance floor.
Maybe that kind of bombast would feel cloying if Swift wasn’t so self-aware. Though Red is, yes, still primarily concerned with the failed glory of lost love– or more accurately, boys– it’s also an anxious record, full of uncertainty and conscious posturing. Money and success can be just as good a fable as Romeo and Juliet, and Swift is deft enough to make a point of and poke fun at her fairytale stardom. She’s quick to mention that she’s falling head over heels not in a Chevy truck but in a Maserati. In “Starlight”, she somehow innocently crashes a “yacht club party,” a telling moment for Swift, whose image rests on the myth that her success really is just one big “impossible dream,” as the song likes to call it.
Part of that impossible dream, Swift surely knows, is her unique critical acceptance and at times adoration amongst those typically unwilling to take any act on the radio seriously. Swift calls them hipsters, and it’s a joy to hear the country-pop star having a go at her own perceived authenticity, or lack thereof. She picks on the indies on “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”, where eschewing a Swift record, Swift’s record collection, or both, for something “much cooler” is grounds for breakup. It feels important that newfound love on “Begin Again”, one of the several songs that finds Swift swooning and genuinely happy, starts in a café, where the hipsters are gazing at the new girl in town. Part of the joy of Red is buying into this new Swift fairytale, where falling love with strangers in cafés can still happen, is watching Swift’s “big-eyed small-town girl takes on the big city” narrative unfold with equal parts humor and amazement.
But the great hook, the reason Swift’s new sounds and energies rarely if ever fall flat, is that the album’s biggest pop release may as also be its saddest song. “22” finds Swift celebrating the joys of youth as though hers had already passed, waxing nostalgic for the present moment right in front of her. If “I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling 22” is really just a way of saying, “it’s great to be alive right now,” then looking back on the glory days doesn’t feel too far away. It’s a clever trick that Swift really does turn 23 in less than two months, that the carefree days of “22” really are fleeting. Time is vanishing from Swift, and clinging onto innocence seems less sweet every year. She’s much less full of venom than plagued by melancholy on her new love-gone-wrong tales, a sign of maturation if there was one.
Still, “22” is more than a sad song dressed up with a beat to make it danceable. “It feels like a perfect night to dress up like hipsters and make fun of our exes,” is the first line of “22” and a fine summary of Red itself, at its heart an album of pretending and party crashing, of masquerading and self-parody. “Who’s Taylor Swift anyway? Who?” whispers one of the cool kids, but Swift’s already left the room. She’s drifting around town from party to party, unsure if she’s welcome anywhere, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t still an impossible dreamer. “You don’t know about me/ but I bet you’ll want to,” is the take-home line to the rest of the world that Taylor Swift is so scared and so thrilled to be conquering, the line she drunkenly sings out of an open window and into the bright city night on her sad, magical cab ride home alone.
Essential Tracks: “All Too Well”, “22″
(3.5/5)
This is counted for Metacritic.
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Member Since: 5/4/2012
Posts: 1,381
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Member Since: 8/20/2011
Posts: 1,843
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The A.V. Club (counted for Metacritic):
Quote:
B+
Taylor Swift hasn’t become one of the most vital artists of the 2000s just by writing monster hooks. Those certainly help, but it also helps that the 22-year-old singer and songwriter, who was a mere 16 when her debut album was released, comes with enough emotional baggage to make her infinitely more interesting than most of her peers. But she’s not messed up in a Fiona Apple, chewed-down fingernails, clawing-at-scarred-skin kind of way. Swift’s problems are more on par with the average 16-year-old girl.
And while she’s grown older over the course of her four albums, she hasn’t necessarily grown up. Red is the next step toward putting those awkward teenage years behind her. Swift’s last album, 2010’s Speak Now, touched on a few adult issues; the fairy-tale-princess dreams of her first two albums were stored away along with—depending on how “Dear John” should be interpreted—her virginity. With Red, she’s become even more unforgiving of the long trail of ex-boyfriends she’s left behind.
“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” Red’s lead single and one of three songs Swift co-wrote with Swedish pop maestro Max Martin, takes swipes at an ex’s indecisiveness and his record collection. And in “22,” also co-penned by Martin, she and her pals “dress up like hipsters” and “make fun of [their] exes.” There’s more of that ribbing, too. Much more.
Lyrically, it’s the same path Swift has walked since her 2006 debut, just deeper and a little darker. But musically, it’s bigger and bolder than anything she’s ever done in the pop world. And really, there hasn’t been much twang in Swift’s country-pop for years now. Red throws a few songs (“I Almost Do,” “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” “Begin Again”) to her original fan base, but this is a pop album. It’s magnificent at times, but it’s also complicated and sometimes unfocused.
How else to explain the dubstep-inspired “I Knew You Were Trouble”? Or the occasional Auto-Tune that makes her sound like any number of indistinguishable female pop singers? Or the blah duets with British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran and Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody? But at 16 songs deep, Red is all about taking some chances. The Martin collaborations are the ones that will cause the most turbulence for her old country fans, but Swift throws plenty of curveballs to make the rest of the album—like the arena-rock guitars that launch opening cut “State Of Grace” and the five-minute-plus slow build of “All Too Well”—an occasionally fascinating work.
The best songs (“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “Begin Again,” the title track) bridge where Swift has been and where she’s going. She’s no longer a naive teen hanging out at her school locker hoping that a cute boy will glance her way. But she’s not grown up enough to jump into a reckless affair, either. (“I’ll do anything you say if you say it with your hands,” she promises in “Treacherous.”) She still believes in the power of love, and she has more than a dozen new songs bitching about it to prove it.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/taylor-swift-red,87872/
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Member Since: 5/15/2012
Posts: 19,136
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Originally posted by teddies
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So Red may not be a bona fide country album, but it could very well be a pop masterpiece, more in line with P!nk’s latest, The Truth About Love, than even Red’s predecessor, Speak Now.
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Member Since: 3/3/2011
Posts: 23,567
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Quote:
Originally posted by Eizen
The A.V. Club (counted for Metacritic):
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That's helpful.
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Member Since: 9/16/2011
Posts: 50,981
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Quote:
Originally posted by RobynYoBank
That's helpful.
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B+ would equate to about an 87, right?
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Member Since: 8/20/2011
Posts: 1,843
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Quote:
Originally posted by JakeKills
B+ would equate to about an 87, right?
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83 if I'm not mistaken (at least that's what they do with Entertainment Weekly) 
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Member Since: 12/19/2009
Posts: 10,504
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Quote:
Originally posted by Eizen
83 if I'm not mistaken (at least that's what they do with Entertainment Weekly) |
That doesn't really make sense for it to only be an 83 but yeah that is what happened with EW so your probably right
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Member Since: 9/16/2011
Posts: 50,981
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Quote:
Originally posted by Eizen
83 if I'm not mistaken |
Really? I guess I just assumed "B+ = 87" because that's how it's always been in school. 
At least an 83 is still a lot better than a 70. 
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Member Since: 3/19/2012
Posts: 5,155
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Quote:
Originally posted by JakeKills
Really? I guess I just assumed "B+ = 87" because that's how it's always been in school.
At least an 83 is still a lot better than a 70. |
+1000
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Member Since: 12/8/2010
Posts: 17,643
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Sputnikmusic 
15 reviews and still 76/100? that's pretty good. 
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Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 12,849
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Thanks y'all. OP updated. 
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Member Since: 3/3/2011
Posts: 23,567
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Her score resisted the Sputnik review 
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Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 12,849
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Quote:
Originally posted by RobynYoBank
Her score resisted the Sputnik review |
I have a feeling that we'll get 1 more Staff review from Sputnik. 
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Member Since: 3/3/2011
Posts: 23,567
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Quote:
Originally posted by thediscomonkey
I have a feeling that we'll get 1 more Staff review from Sputnik. |
It looks like NME may not bother reviewing it despite advertising her album all over their news stories for a week. 
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Member Since: 9/16/2011
Posts: 50,981
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Quote:
Originally posted by thediscomonkey
I have a feeling that we'll get 1 more Staff review from Sputnik. |
Hopefully it will be a bit more fair and objective. 
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Member Since: 3/3/2011
Posts: 23,567
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22 is such a thundering pop anthem.
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Member Since: 10/31/2011
Posts: 16,937
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Am living for all the "22x Platinum" praise and "The Last Crime" shade in these reviews, poor discomonkey.
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