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Discussion: Taylor Swift - 'RED' | Metascore: 77/100
Member Since: 6/22/2011
Posts: 3,959
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Member Since: 11/29/2010
Posts: 19,664
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'Slant' will never give her more than 3. I am here for their ATW stanning tho.
How much did they give BTW?
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Member Since: 12/13/2011
Posts: 26,638
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Star-like mope of "Sad Beautiful Tragic" is just dreary instead of melancholy.
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Member Since: 12/7/2010
Posts: 26,813
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Member Since: 1/19/2012
Posts: 8,596
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Star-like mope of "Sad Beautiful Tragic" is just dreary instead of melancholy.
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Did they lie though?
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Member Since: 12/13/2011
Posts: 26,638
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Originally posted by Dingdong123
Did they lie though?
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Both of the album's duets ("The Last Time," with Snow Patrol frontman Gary Lightbody, and "Everything Has Changed," with Ed Sheeran) are lifeless adult-contemporary fodder,
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i mean i agree with this though..
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Member Since: 3/3/2011
Posts: 23,567
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Originally posted by muddysquirrel
'Slant' will never give her more than 3. I am here for their ATW stanning tho.
How much did they give BTW?
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4. Born This Way pretty much swept all of the hardest reviewers (Rolling Stone, Slant, Spin, NME, etc.)
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Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 12,849
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Bad news is: Slant review counts for Metascore.
Good news: Another positive review, not counted sadly, from HitFix:
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Taylor Swift’s second collection was named “Fearless,” but that title seems more apt for her latest album, “Red. Out tomorrow (Oct. 22), the set is the biggest release of 2012 and is expected to sell more than 1 million copies in its first week.
After moving millions of albums, selling out arenas around the world, introducing oodles of younger fans to country music, and creating her own cottage industry based on songs about her good-for-nothing ex-boyfriends, Swift has crafted an album that portrays an artist in transition musically, if not thematically. The 22-year old is not just sliding further toward the pop end of the country-pop spectrum she has navigated since her 2006 self-titled debut, but also strongly gravitating toward rock. She seamlessly and fearlessly veers between these various musical styles.
“Red” says as much about her estimable abilities as a musical sponge as it does about how her generation of music fans casually disregards genres and embraces any song that speaks to them, regardless of the format some Clear Channel programmer has tried to pigeonhole it into.
But forget about Swift for a minute. On “Red,” her fourth studio album, the star is the drums. Almost every song, even the very few that will get country radio play, is produced with the drums well upfront in the mix and often with a full-throttle rock sensibility. While that is most patently obvious with the drum flourish that opens the album on the U2-meets-the-Cranberries-like “State of Grace” and “The Last Time,” her atmospheric duet with Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody; the steady kick drum thump of “Holy Ground” and the dubstep-dabbling “I Knew You Were Trouble” reinforce it.
Swift works with longtime producer Nathan Chapman on a number of cuts here, but she also turns to Jeff Bhasker, best known for his work with Beyonce and Kanye West; Dan Wilson, who wrote and produced “Someone Like You” with Adele; slick pop-meisters Max Martin and Shellback, best known for their work with Pink and Britney Spears; Snow Patrol’s producer Jacknife Lee and Dann Huff, who’s worked with everyone from Keith Urban to Bon Jovi.
Lyrically for Swift, every sense remains heightened, every emotion goes to 11. Every chance feels like the last chance, the last opportunity for one last glance, one last kiss, one last moment together. She’s constantly on the edge of a heated, passionate precipice, which has to be exhausting. Even a simple declaration such as “I just like hanging out with you” turns into “I’d like to hang out with you...for my whole life.” A man simply opening the door for her can cause her to spin off into the promise of love everlasting.
While she seemingly left clues all over 2010’s “Speak Now” about the identity of every celebrity boy who invoked her wrath, the evidence isn’t so clear here or it could just be that at this point, it seems like the check-out boy could look at her wrong and she’‘d run to her tear-stained guitar and catalog what a bad, neglectful boyfriend he was.
To be fair, she chronicles the beginning stages before anything has time to go wrong as well. On the sloping, gentle “Everything has Changed,” written with and featuring Ed Sheeran, she declares that since meeting her new beau 18 hours ago, “All I know is since yesterday, everything has changed” (see what we mean about dramatic?) On current single, the lovely “Begin Again,” she comes to life after a first date with a new suitor. On one of the album’s strongest tracks, “Starlight,” which opens with a feathery, tinkling synth line before exploding into guitar rock, she dreams of having 10 kids.
But her hope —and seemingly inevitable heartache—is often the listeners’ gain. Swift’s great strength as a songwriter is her ability to unselfconsciously communicate feelings via a small gesture, a greatly detailed line or phrase that intimately describes the situation. On the swelling “All Too Well,” which builds up to a fun.-like crescendo, she recounts her ex’s mother telling Swift about his days as a “little kid in glasses in a twin-sized bed.” She's decimated by the break-up, but she lowers the boom in the last verse, when it turns out he was too—so much so that he keeps her scarf hidden in his drawer. On the alternative, quiet “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” which wouldn’t sound out of place on a Cowboy Junkies album (no kidding), she brilliantly sums up her ex thusly: “You’ve got your demons and they all look like me.”
Swift has become enough of a standard bearer of the very mainstream pop/country scene to have a little fun with her reputation: on first single and former chart-topper “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” she drops a line about how her boyfriend would desert her to listen to “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.” On “22,” she’s at a club with the “cool” kids and one of the hipsters brattily drips, “Who’s Taylor Swift anyway?”
She also admits her histrionic nature on “Stay, Stay, Stay,” a sweet, peppy country tune that winks at her heightened sense of drama on the love front and the boyfriend who combats it with seemingly endless reserves of humor and patience. To her credit, she even carries off the nearly impossible line, “Before you, I only dated self indulgent takers who took all of the their problems out on me,” in the ditty.
It would be nice if something —anything — else other than love moved Swift to write a song. She doesn’t have to embrace a cause like saving the whales, but musically, she has defined herself largely as the perpetually lovestruck-***-hurt-***-angry girl and that can get tiresome...though obviously not to her. Unfortunately, the problem is that when she tries to move beyond that here with “The Lucky One,” it doesn’t work. A largely observational look at a faded star who disappeared from the limelight, and whom Swift feels may have gotten it right by running away, is one of the few songs that fails and feels clumsily constructed despite Bhasker’s strong production. She has much better success with “22,” a Max Martin/Shellback production that crosses Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” with Hot Chelle Rae’s “Tonight Tonight.” The song also captures the zeitgeist of being 22: “Yeah, we’re happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time/It’s miserable and magical, oh yeah.” The same could be said of the emotions that run through “Red.”
For the early Swift adopter who liked the pop-leaning country of her first two albums, this is probably where they depart the Taylor train. For those who like their pop artists to explore a wide range of musical idioms, then “Red” will definitely take them on an entertaining, if notably one track, ride. (A)
http://www.hitfix.com/news/album-rev...musical-colors
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Member Since: 11/29/2010
Posts: 19,664
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All that 'The Lucky One' shade. **** you y'all!
Bigger more respected critics paying her dust.
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Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 12,849
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Originally posted by Icannot
i mean i agree with this though..
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You are on the top of my hit list.
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Member Since: 3/3/2011
Posts: 23,567
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Member Since: 10/31/2011
Posts: 16,937
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Originally posted by RobynYoBank
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Nicely written but
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There's just not a lot of engaging songwriting in some of those tracks; "Holy Ground" and "Stay, Stay, Stay" (despite a peppy beginning motif) specifically come to mind.
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Falseties.
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Member Since: 10/29/2010
Posts: 29,249
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Originally posted by RobynYoBank
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This won't count for MetaCritic. This is just a user review, it needs to be reviewed by a Staff member to be counted.
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Member Since: 6/22/2011
Posts: 3,959
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Originally posted by RobynYoBank
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But that review is an user review, not a staff review
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Member Since: 3/6/2011
Posts: 11,407
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Originally posted by RobynYoBank
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So it will keep on falling
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Member Since: 11/9/2011
Posts: 12,849
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If it's user review, it won't count. Expect something from a contributor reviewer later this day from Sputnik. His will be count.
And more reviews coming in:
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As a teenager, Taylor Swift hit paydirt with a song about being a teenager; “Fifteen” distilled the storm and stress of pre-adulthood’s crushing loves as well as any song — pop, country or otherwise — of the past decade. Now, having long outgrown the one-horse towns that dot the landscape of Fearless and looking out from her penthouse over the “big ol’ city” she envisions herself someday inhabiting on Speak Now, on Red Swift delivers a twentysomething’s song about being a twentysomething.
As sure a hit as has ever left Swift’s prolific pen, “22” opens with the sort of jumpy, major-chord guitar progression that could start off a late-’90s pop-punk tune, soon driving headlong into a stomping dance beat and an opening line that marks a departure from her previous material both in its insouciant tone and in its noticeably electronic production.
"It feels like a perfect night,” Swift talk-sings with a nasally, mischievous, borderline-Ke$ha smirk, “to dress up like hipsters and make fun of our exes."
Funny enough, she could top off that "hipster" costume by slipping on the over-sized plastic-frame glasses she wore to play the part of nerdy outcast in the video for "You Belong to Me” — how times change. Indeed, by the time we reach the confetti-cannon of a chorus that anchors “22,” producer-collaborators Max Martin and Shellback have dialed in enough sweeping, uptempo synthesizer to bring this party in the U.S.A. to a frenzied peak. Nothing about this song is interested in going "Back to December" — everything is this night, this moment.
“I don’t know about you / But I’m feeling 22” aren’t the most profound words Swift has ever sung into a microphone, but she sounds like she’s having fun, and the song’s ebullience is utterly infectious. Not to mention how well it conveys the linsey-woolsey twentysomethingness of it all: “We are happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time,” Swift sings. And then admitting, perhaps, a penchant for courting trouble — sure to yield potential hit-song fodder one way or the other — she sings hungrily, “You look like bad news / I gotta have you.”
The trio of songs bearing pop maestro Martin’s touch — “22,” the lead single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” and the decidedly Britney-esque “I Knew You Were Trouble” — veer farthest and most thrillingly from Swift’s signature sound, gaudy and plastic where she has more often been tasteful and understated. Country purists (whatever that means) who’ve hung on this long might finally take their leave. Either that, or Carrie Underwood is auditioning Moog players right now.
Of course, the closely observed balladry Swift is known for is also fully on display, and she pulls from her binders full of men for wintry breakup litanies like “Treacherous” and “Holy Ground.” She overplays her hand sometimes, though, as in “All Too Well,” where an ex-lover holds onto an old scarf because “it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me.”
Less a stylistic departure than the electro-dance jams, but as much (or more) a sign of artistic growth, are two duets — the Civil Wars-y “This Is the Last Time,” with Gary Lightbody, and the delicate “Everything Has Changed,” with British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran. It’s jarring, at first, to hear anyone else’s voice so high in the mix on a Swift record, much less dude from Snow Patrol, but the performances are solid, and the dual perspectives both deepen the material and mark an improvement over songs like Speak Now’s interminable mope “Dear John.”
Swift’s songwriting has so often focused on either the first kiss or the last caress, but here she lingers a bit more on the difficult stuff between, and the songs are better for it. And while she’s still not above knocking one of her exes down a peg or seven, she’s also turned some of the criticism on herself: “You’ve got your demons,” she sings on “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” “and darling, they all look like me.”
Red may not succeed as an exorcism for Swift’s vanquished lovers, but as a rangy pop record, deliriously fun at times and haltingly introspective at others, it’s awfully good. (4.5/5)
http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashvi...ift-red-review
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A platinum artist many times over, singer Taylor Swift at 22 seems to be on top of the world. She’s dating a Kennedy, earning millions, and has touched the lives of generations with her delicate lyrical sensibility and songs of love. She’s a near-constant hot topic on the Internet whose existence is more closely watched than just about anyone’s on the planet. And on “Red,” she’s easing into this role.
“Red” is Swift’s fourth album since her breakout debut in 2006, and it’s the most consistently surprising of the lot -- even if it reveals an artist whose success has most definitely gone to her head. Completely aware of the scope of her fame, Swift is more often the teacher than the student in her new songs, and in this role she’s offering lessons on the importance of musical versatility while continuing her laser-beam focus on the emotional workings of her heart.
This versatility is the album’s most striking characteristic. Beginning with the aspirational rock song “State of Grace,” which sounds like a U2 cover circa “The Joshua Tree,” and moving through dance pop of the Max Martin-produced “I Knew You Were Trouble” to the soft-rock gem “The Lucky One,” Swift seems to have crossed some sort of emotional threshold.
Absent are the tentative questions of a young woman trying to process life and love through song, and in their place are the assured words and music of a star who feels like she has learned a lot about life and wants to share her knowledge. It’s no accident that she name-drops Pablo Neruda in the first sentence of an introductory “Prologue" in the record's liner notes.
This two-paragraph essay sets the tone for the sentiments to come. “This album is about the other kinds of love that I’ve recently fallen in and out of," Swift writes. "Love that was treacherous, sad, beautiful, and tragic. But most of all, this record is about love that was red.”
“Red” is a big record that reaches for Importance and occasionally touches it, filled with well-constructed pop songs Taylor-made for bedroom duets. If “Everything Has Changed," a powerful collaboration with British singer Ed Sheeran, or the mandolin-driven romance “Treacherous,” were automobiles, they’d be parked in an Audi or BMW showroom -- sleek, solid and built for comfort. There are no bumps on “Red.” Only clean, perfectly rendered American popular music.
But to toss one of Swift’s better similes back at her, the pop fodder on “Red” at its worst feels “like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street.” Much of the record's expansion is in sound rather than structure -- even if half of "Red" will still work perfectly well on commercial country radio playlists. Whether it's the harder rock of “State of Grace” or the Hallmark-ready treacle of “I Almost Do,” at times Swift feels like a mere cypher for the music that surrounds her. To mix metaphors, she occasionally resembles a flawless mannequin upon which any number of fashions look fabulous.
In this context, to call Swift’s sonic expansion a brave move is to credit her with accomplishing something more artistically significant than simply shifting toward the center of her demographic. By setting rural music alongside more “urban” sounds of the moment, Swift is arguably just responding to a pop world in which country singles might please her base, but certainly doesn’t expand it.
But that’s the cynic’s view, and Swift on “Red” has little time for cynicism. Rather, she's striving for something much more grand and accomplished. (3/4)
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...,2686298.story
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Member Since: 9/16/2011
Posts: 50,981
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LA Times' should count towards metacritic; they were used for Speak Now.
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Member Since: 3/27/2010
Posts: 6,259
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Really? I find it inconsistent. Anyway, there are a lot of great tracks for sure
Edit: Oh based on 5 reviews
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Member Since: 3/19/2012
Posts: 5,155
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Originally posted by I. AX
So it will keep on falling
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You would like it right?
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Member Since: 3/3/2011
Posts: 23,567
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Originally posted by enchanted0
But that review is an user review, not a staff review
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Oh, you're right. But still, the score will drop to that range depending on weights unless more reviews come in.
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