[thediscomonkey]

More.....

Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated fourth album comes off, essentially, as a roman-without-clef of her various highly-publicized flings over the past while. Titillated gossip fans will certainly have a grand old time trying to decipher which boyfriend goes with which song. Swift isn’t telling.

But Red will be appreciated for more than tabloid tales. As Swift falls for the wrong guy (Treacherous), surrenders to wacky spontaneity (22), faces a do-or-die relationship moment (The Last Time) or thinks regretfully of what might have been (I Almost Do), the specific becomes the universal. Female listeners in their pre-teens, teens and early 20s, who make up the lion’s share of Swift’s constituency, will find the ups and downs of their own relationships echoed here.

On that count, mission accomplished.

The music is a trickier subject. Swift has said Red is her most adventurous album yet. That’s a mystery, given how much she sounds like every other heart-on-sleeve, factory-processed female pop star on this disc, except maybe for a touch of U2 lite in State of Grace and All Too Well. Really, is there such a great difference between this and, for example, an Avril Lavigne album – except, of course, for Swift’s astronomic sales figures?

One sometimes gets the feeling that a computer program is giving the orders: the leap to a high note every alternate syllable in the chorus of I Knew You Were Trouble, for example, has worked countless times, so why mess with the formula? And there’s the ever-present need to layer on the harmonies in pretty much every song so people will notice when the chorus starts.

To be fair, that’s just the way pop hits are made now. At this point in Swift’s career, it seems as inappropriate to use the word “country” as it does to sneak it into a Lady Antebellum or Kenny Chesney piece: a banjo struggling pathetically to be heard in the title song, a forlorn, resigned steel guitar in the closing track, Begin Again, and a bit of mandolin here and there are the only ghosts.

More revealing is the participation of Swedish hitmaking producers Max Martin and Shellback to add synth-pop sheen on a couple of tracks. Their big moment is the sassy flip-off We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, which survives on an insipid, but maddeningly catchy tune and a bit of silly, low-rent wit.

Too much of the disc’s excessive running time of 66 minutes is given to dime-a-dozen ballads like the pedestrian duets with Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol (The Last Time) and Ed Sheeran (Everything Has Changed) (Sheeran, not surprisingly, is very much at home with a forgettable song himself). Some tracks sound like plain old filler (Holy Ground, Sad Beautiful Tragic).

The mandolin-driven Stay Stay Stay, with its breezy, unforced melody and real instruments, is a breath of fresh air, showing the album that might have been if the music-processing and star-making machines had been turned off more frequently.

At the end of the song, Swift laughs. “That’s so fun,” she exclaims. (2 Stars)

http://blogs.montrealgazette.com/201...t-big-machine/

It's finally here! Taylor Swift's fourth album hit stores Monday morning. There is going to be a lot of talk about how she's "left country" and "crossed into pop," and yes, other than a mandolin or two the album is more hot dance beats than banjo strumming.

That said, the main story here is the actual lyrics and content of her album. Swift is known for writing very personal songs about the men who have broken her heart. It's a fun game trying to match songs to her current love life: Forever & Always = Joe Jonas, Back to September = Taylor Lautner, Dear John = John Mayer?, Red = ... John Mayer? She has an interesting track record of former lovers or in her words "characters." You usually know what you're going to get with Swift, personal accounts of her life. But, this is album is freeer.

Swift might not be fully shedding her country roots but she is expanding more fully into a world of pop. Her words and lyrics are a little less guarded and more raw. She's growing up, she is having more "real" world experiences.

Red's 16 tracks (which has some tracks that could've been cut ... ) were recorded with seven sets of producers in several locations, which creates fresh and varied tracks. But the standouts are the three tight tracks from sessions in Stockholm, with Max Martin and Shellback in the booth: stud single We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together; I Knew You Were Trouble, accented with vocal stutters and propulsive programmed keyboards and guitars; and the crisp 22, in which she sums up her zeitgeist with "Everything will be all right if we just keep dancing like we're 22.''

Swift's Nashville sessions with longtime producer Nathan Chapman resulted in songs that are not as flashy and employ acoustic instruments, but have more lyrical depth. Breathy ballad All Too Well, written with Liz Rose, bitterly describes a guy who was "casually cruel in the name of being honest,'' while the sprightly and sweetly silly Stay Stay Stay pokes fun at her own brattish behavior: "I'm pretty sure we almost broke up last night. I threw my phone across the room at you ... but you stayed."

In addition to the forementioned songs also download State of Grace, Begin Again, and Treacherous. I am not willing to say that this album is her best yet, or that you should go out and buy it ASAP. But she has some great songs to dance to, get over guys to.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/17...lbum-and-sound

Red is the fourth studio album from Taylor Swift. The darling of the country-pop scene since her eponymous debut album in 2006, Red is the follow-up to 2010’s Speak Now. In the two years since finding major commercial success Swift has cultivated a more adult sound and Red is a 16-track union of her country singer past with a more polished pop present.

In the past, Taylor Swift has had the ability to go from “We have a happy wonderful rose-tinted fairytale love” to full-on Liam Neeson style “I will make you and your new girlfriend’s life a living hell” over the course of an album. Speak Now’s ‘Better Than Revenge’ is a prime example of this. Thankfully, this juvenile narrative is not present in Red.

Passive aggressive lyrics are nowhere to be found, though she still does what she is known for best, which is writing songs about her exes. She’s not a lady you want to cross, really, because it will be to her benefit. ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’, Red’s lead single, became the fastest selling single in iTunes history, topping the chart 50 minutes after its release in August. The song also peaked at number four in the Irish Charts, giving Swift her second top ten hit here.

‘22’, in a similar vein to ‘Never Ever’, is a catchy pop tune that is a tribute to being young. It stands out for its lyrics that will make you smile; “It feels like a perfect night to dress up like hipsters and make fun of our exes” while managing to be a succinct description of where most of us are in our early twenties; “We’re happy, free, confused and lonely in the best way”. Expect to catch at least one of your friends belting this into a hairbrush while throwing some serious moves. Moving swiftly on from that mental image, ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’ is an ode to bad boys. Taylor Swift seems to encounter a lot of these, lucky that or there’d be no fodder for her lyrics. Sharp and clean, there’s an electronic element that provides a change of pace, it’s an interesting direction to see her take.

Red features a charming collaboration with Gary Lightbody, ‘The Last Time’. Snow Patrol’s lead singer risks outshining Swift in this melodic duet with his strong vocal presence, it does sound like it was pulled straight from one of the band’s albums. However this is not to Red’s detriment, as it serves to highlight the clarity and sweetness of Taylor’s voice with its harmonies. A slow burner, ‘The Last Time’ builds from a quiet opening verse to a dramatic closing minute, with the lyrics “this is the last time I’m asking you this” repeated on top of themselves until they fade into silence.

There’s nothing bad to speak of on this album, rather, some songs dip into a tired sameness. Of the 16 tracks on Red, some of the more gentle musings accompanied by an acoustic guitar such as ‘All Too Well’ and ‘I Almost Do’ could have been done away with entirely and they would not have been missed.

It’s familiar territory for Swift as she reminisces on “singing in a car and getting lost upstate” with a former flame in ‘All Too Well’; one could be fooled into thinking she’s still 16 years old. The saccharine sweetness of the lyrics are a slice of Americana that she may feel obligated to pay lip service to, bearing in mind the country fans that make up her target audience. If you are a fan of this side of Swift’s music, there’s plenty of mellow country-pop to keep you going throughout the album, with understated verses and emphatic choruses.

As a whole, this album is Swift’s most impressive work to date. It’s the product of someone who knows what she’s good at, and knows what her fans want. A little familiarity can be forgiven when an artist’s sound has evolved to the point where they’re not afraid to experiment, and they do so rather well.

Taylor Swift has given us an album that is fun, energetic and heartfelt while remaining mature enough that it can be proudly displayed on your iPod’s playlist. Well, maybe…

http://thedailyshift.com/2012/10/22/...-taylor-swift/

[Underdogs]

**** slant

[thediscomonkey]

From Roughstock:

With smart marketing and branding, Taylor Swift has managed to maintain her star status in the music world and save a #2 stop for "You Belong With Me," Taylor Swift really hasn't had much of a huge impact on pop radio airplay charts. All of this should change with Red, a record which features a major pop/rock aesthetic but instead of just being a slew of US pop airplay singles, Red features a decidedly more UK style to the album.

Lyrically, the songs about relationships are here but what did we expect from Taylor Swift? Did people really expect a singer who has buttered her bread with relationship-centric songs to change into some ambassador for world peace and "Change The World" style songs? But this doesn't mean that Redisn't an evolution in themes as the record isn't as outright 'he did me wrong' or 'he did me right but I let him go anyway' songs. Instead, we get a nice slice of relationships surprising Swift on "State of Grace," a grandiose progressive melody with moody snares and soaring electric guitars, "22" a surefire pop radio hit co-written with "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together collaborators, producers Max Martin and Shellback.

"The Lucky One," "Sad Beautiful Tragic" and "I Almost Do" are joined by "Begin Again" as the softer, emotive tracks on the record and they're all songs that could do quite well on mainstream country radio. "Begin Again" is already doing nicely on radio. "All Too Well," "Red" and "Stay, Stay, Stay" are also contenders to hit radio, particularly "Red," which isn't too 'outlandish' for airplay after the success of Carrie Underwood's similar sounding (but completely different lyrically) song "Blown Away." "Starlight" fits as a potential country radio smash, should Swift and company deem it worthy of country's attention.

There are a couple notable guests on Red both "The Last Time" and "Everything Has Changed." Both are duets with collaborators Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol and Ed Sheeran, respectively. The former features more of that epic, atmospheric melodic tapestry that is the cohesive glue to Red while exploring a sound also visited on "Safe And Sound" from The Hunger Games earlier this year. The latter song finds Sheeran showcasing his hugely popular style with Swift on a steady acoustic pop track that could give them a massive worldwide radio hit. Their voices meld well together and Butch Walker's production on the track is steady. Lightbody even provides harmonies on the track.

Featuring just acoustic guitars, bass and drums, "I Almost Do" is about as close to a Taylor Swift demo as we're likely to hear on a full-on album of 16 tracks. A solo write from Taylor, "I Almost Do" features a nice lilting melody backing honest lyrics about a failed relationship. Her biggest critics may think Taylor needs to stop writing about the romantic relationships of her life but then it wouldn't be as honest and direct as people have come to expect. If she suddenly started writing about politics or worldly issues, many would consider it 'fake' and that finds her in a darned if you do, damned if you don't set of circumstances. So, with Red, Taylor just wrote about what she knows best, brought in some new, outside collaborators, spread her wings a big and for the most part, She succeeds in delivering a consistent collection of songs that will serve multiple sets of fans, from the more older, country/pop core to her newer, pop-leaning fans. (4/5)

http://www.roughstock.com/reviews/al...ylor-swift-red

[Great Username]

and for the most part, She succeeds in delivering a consistent collection of songs that will serve multiple sets of fans, from the more older, country/pop core to her newer, pop-leaning fans.

THEY BETTER PRAISE THE LORD WITH THAT CAPITALISED PRONOUN.

[thediscomonkey]

Originally posted by Great Username

and for the most part, She succeeds in delivering a consistent collection of songs that will serve multiple sets of fans, from the more older, country/pop core to her newer, pop-leaning fans.

THEY BETTER PRAISE THE LORD WITH THAT CAPITALISED PRONOUN.

How the hell did you notice that?

[thediscomonkey]

Thanks @ muddysquirrel. Also thanks to RobynYoBank (for Slant) & atishvaze (for Roughstock)

Taylor Swift is on the road to world domination. Her new album, Red, picks up the best parts of her three album career and sets them up for her large audience to love. Granted, her world domination is only in the pop-music category and she’s already a renowned female idol, but Red takes it up a notch. Taylor Swift knows what she has now and certainly knows how to play it.

The largest criticism of the young songwriter is that her songs are all about the same thing; heartbreak. Red fires back by using that theme of being in a relationship throughout the entire album, almost in a chronological way. With the start of the album being about falling in love, the middle being about the breakup, and the end being about acceptance. It’s admirable that Swift isn’t taking her criticism too hard and continuing to do what she wants to do. Her vision is clear once “State of Grace” begins. The song, nearly five minutes long, is a fantastic introduction to Red with a U2-esque sound that reverberates onto the catchiest song on the album “Red.” The first three songs of the album fit well together and give the album a nice steady flow until “I Knew You Were Trouble” ends that with its very off-putting pop-genre change. It’s very jarring after the three-punch “Grace,” “Red,” and “Treacherous.”

Despite the album being quite possibly the best Swift album yet, “22” could be her worst song lyrically. The amazing thing is though, it’s horribly catchy and therefore unskippable when listening to Red. The front half of the album is incredibly heavy with go-to Swift classics and soon-to-be fan favorite songs that she will be playing for years to come. Red consists of sixteen songs which is typical for a pop album, but one can’t help but wonder why this many songs made it? There are a few songs that should be reordered (I’d put “Trouble” somewhere around “Holy Ground.” “Trouble” just has a tempo that doesn’t fit between its top and bottom tracks.)

It being too long isn’t that great of a criticism though because if one believes that to be the problem, they can simply solve it by turning it off whenever they want to. The songs are still strong and catchy even if they step out of the ordinary. If Red isn’t the best album from Taylor Swift thus far, it certainly is the most experimental as she wanders outs of the country-pop bubble and tries something different, yet still familiar. (4.5/5)

http://basedonnothing.net/2012/10/22...lor-swift-red/

It's virtually impossible to believe that Taylor Swift is still only 22.
The US pop-country siren has been a multi-platinum-selling phenomenon in her native land for so long you almost imagine she must be pushing middle age, but Red, both her fourth album and her coming-of-age record, is her strongest and most vital release yet.

Where Swift's youth and inevitable emotional maturity rendered her previous efforts frequently twee and bland, this time around she is tackling subjects of greater psychological depth as well as venturing into fresh musical terrains.

Thus the attitudinal We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together heads into feisty Katy Perry-pop terrain, I Knew You Were Trouble charts a bad-boy relationship and Begin Again finds her taking a deep breath and attempting to love again after a bruising break-up.

This would mean nothing, of course, if Swift didn't render all of these triumphs and travails in a gorgeously affecting vocal over sumptuous melodies and with choruses to die for. After three lauded-but-limited albums and 22 million record sales, Taylor Swift has finally found her voice. (4/5)

http://www.virginmedia.com/music/rev...-swift-red.php

[Achilles.]

These are the 9 on metacritic so far:
Billboard- 86
EW- 83
The Observer UK- 80
The Guardian- 80
LA Times- 75
Boston Globe- 70
Rolling Stone- 70
Slant- 60
Telegraph (UK)- 60

AVG: 77

[thediscomonkey]

And counted for Metacritic, Boston Globe gave a 70:

With her new album ‘Red,’ Taylor Swift grows up
Pursues pop hits — and more mature songwriting

For a sense of how much Taylor Swift has matured on her new album, compare the title track with that of her last record.

“Speak Now,” from 2010, cast Swift as a hapless “girl” (in her words) who crashed the wedding of her ex-boyfriend and proceeded to hide behind a curtain and make silly jokes about the bride. The whole scenario was cute, like something a lovable sitcom character would do for a cheap laugh.

Think of “Red” as the next chapter in that young girl’s life. She has become a young woman, and that joke isn’t funny anymore. Now she’s writing about heartache from a decidedly grown-up perspective.

“Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street,” Swift sings in the killer opening line before expounding on the color metaphor:

“Losing him was blue like I’ve never known/ Missing him was dark gray, all alone . . ./ But loving him was red/ Oh, red, burning red.’’

Look, it’s not Bob Dylan, but the songwriting is leagues ahead of where Swift was as recently as two years ago.

That’s the good news about “Red,” which was released today and stands to be one of the year’s biggest sellers. It’s her fourth studio album and the first one that makes you forget it was made by Taylor Swift the precocious princess of country-pop. Her lyrics are stronger, as is her voice. (A Rolling Stone cover story this month noted she has “refocused on vocal lessons”; it shows here.)

Swift has always leaned heavily on pop music, but “Red” is acutely her most calculated move toward Top 40 radio domination. She even enlisted Max Martin, the Swedish producer and songwriter whose credits range from Britney Spears to Christina Aguilera, to work his Midas touch on a handful of numbers, all of which stick out like exotic animals on an album full of house cats.

In hot pursuit of pop hits — and “Red” surely has at least three or four of them — Swift also doesn’t want to lose the story songs that have made her so relatable, particularly to a young audience. “Fifteen,” from 2008’s “Fearless,” spoke poetically to the challenges of that fraught age. Swift is 22 now and owning her experiences, both good and bad.

“We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” the monster hit first single, which is easily the most one-note moment on the album, established the template Martin devised with fellow Swedish producer Shellback. The verses are conversational, but then the choruses lay on a genteel layer of rock bombast. “22” and “I Knew You Were Trouble” vaguely make Swift sound like she’s Katy Perry approximating Joan Jett.

On “22,” you’ll be forgiven if you mistake Swift for Ke$ha when you hear how she delivers the lyrics in a deadpan recitation: “It feels like a perfect night/ To dress up like hipsters/ And make fun of our exes . . .  We’re happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time/ It’s miserable and magical.”

For the chorus Swift ramps up the swagger: “I don’t know about you/ But I’m feeling 22/ Everything will be all right/ If you keep me next to you.”

Simple, sure, but who didn’t feel like that at that age?

As with all of her albums, “Red” is overstuffed. Sixteen songs pad it out to just over 65 minutes, and it drags accordingly. The misfires are at least interesting, a window into how Swift and her team are trying to broaden her comfort zone. “The Last Time” pairs her with Gary Lightbody, lead singer of the Irish rock band Snow Patrol, but they’re the odd couple. Against an orchestral backdrop, his morose croon sounds dreary alongside her thin, unadorned vocals.

But the gamble pays off on “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” which, of course, refers to one of Swift’s failed romances. It’s an unusual addition to her catalog — a ballad both dreamy and devastating — and marks the first time you could claim Swift is a sensual singer. It also gives her one of the album’s sliest lines that reminds you she’s not a kid anymore: “You’ve got your demons/ And darlin’, they all look like me.”

About the genre. Is this a country album? If your notion of country music involves the occasional banjo or mandolin, then absolutely. Otherwise, Swift is on the same middle-of-the-road path that Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks blazed long before her.

The difference, at least on “Red,” is that we get to witness Swift blossom as both a pop star and a young woman. Just as Adele named her two albums after the ages when she made them (“19” and “21”), Swift makes records that double as diaries.

http://bostonglobe.com/arts/music/20...aoL/story.html

[Finny]

Originally posted by Great Username

and for the most part, She succeeds in delivering a consistent collection of songs that will serve multiple sets of fans, from the more older, country/pop core to her newer, pop-leaning fans.

THEY BETTER PRAISE THE LORD WITH THAT CAPITALISED PRONOUN.

HAHA NO

[Achilles.]

Originally posted by Hartford Courant

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

Hartford Courant posted this review, and they've been on metacritic for both Fearless and Speak Now. 75

[Eaten By Lions]

She's holding up reasonably well I would have expected her more pop-driven sound to lower her scores among the critics.

[Tainted Blood]

Everything's good so far! I just want her to stay in the 70's. And since the majority of the critics love the album, she can do it

[thediscomonkey]

Originally posted by JakeKills

Hartford Courant posted this review, and they've been on metacritic for both Fearless and Speak Now. 75

Linked to the OP.

[Finny]

Slant always brings her down & usually they are the harshest on her. Hopefully that review is the harshest and the rest are good

[Tainted Blood]

Originally posted by rrr13rcc

Slant always brings her down & usually they are the harshest on her. Hopefully that review is the harshest and the rest are good

Majority of the critics are good, there's nothing to worry about
And the good critics keep coming

[dragon]

MSN's Review

Taylor Swift, "Red"
All grown up? Not yet. But Swift comes off as more complex on her fourth album. Although her lyrics focus relentlessly on L-O-V-E, a wider range of musical approaches, from the arena-sized emotions of "State of Grace" to the more affecting, detailed miniatures ("Stay Stay Stay"), complement her succinct, vivid takes on the subject. The most striking moments tinker with her familiar persona, incorporating edgier production elements -- including a dubstep chorus on "I Knew You Were Trouble" -- or an increasingly sophisticated worldview. As the experimentation tapers off midway through its 16 songs, "Red" becomes more workmanlike: solid yet unsurprising. - Kurt B. Reighley
3.5/5
http://music.msn.com/music/newthisweek/

[Doc]

That's pretty damn great. She better go.

[thediscomonkey]

Originally posted by dragonhunter

MSN's Review

I'm wondering if Christgau will review this. Come on dude.

[FameFatale]

Really good reviews.

[dragon]

From Idolator

Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’: Album Review

“You don’t know about me, but you want to,” sings Taylor Swift on “22,” one of the more delirious pop gems on her new album Red, due out October 22 on Big Machine Records. She’s right: The national obsession with Swift’s personal life shows no sign of slowing. Swift’s signature heartbreak anthems are inextricably connected to the famous men she dates, which makes the guess-the-celebrity game that the media plays with her deeply confessional songwriting much more fun than deconstructing, say, the latest Katy Perry song.

But even as it informs her music, Swift’s romantic life is probably the least interesting thing about her. What’s still the most compelling feature of the Taylor Swift industrial complex is the dexterity with which she translates the minute specificity of her experience into songs that resonate with millions of diehard devotees — not in the predictable way, with generalities and abstractions, but with finely rendered details that betray a writer’s nerdy touch. In a world of pop stars, Swift is a memoirist who sings. That would be interesting even if she were dating civilians.

This tendency is less obvious on Red than in any of her three previous studio albums, but Swift has learned when to withhold her verboseness and when to use it. The explosive chorus in lead single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is all Max Martin‘s Swedish shellack, as simple a hook as any on the radio. (Compare the minimalist spunk of that chorus, built around the simple repetition of “We are never ever ever getting back together,” with the chorus on “Mine,” the lead single from Speak Now, which contained the tongue-twisting mouthful “You made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter.”) Likewise, on the sunny-but-rueful “I Knew You Were Trouble,” the chorus lyrics are just spare enough to make room for that dubstep wobble to explode.

Red packs a handful of polished pop songs like “Together” and “Trouble,” and even the figurative language-heavy title track, with its electro stutter on the chorus, feels smooth and shiny as any of her previous work, which received its country-pop-rock luster courtesy of Nathan Chapman. On Red, Swift teamed up with a crew of the industry’s most reliable hitmakers, including Martin, Shellback and even Jeff Bhasker, who (ironically) helmed much of Kanye West‘s critically acclaimed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

It’s Swift herself, though, who leads the charge on diversions into sonic experimentation that wouldn’t fare as well on the radio, and they feel even more exciting. “State of Grace,” with its layers of reverb and galloping backbeat, evokes Coldplay and U2; and that latter influence is clearest of all on “Treacherous,” those aching guitars referencing “With Or Without You” as Swift sings about sex for the first time since alluding to poor Abigail’s bygone virginity in “Fifteen.” “I’ll do anything you say/If you say it with your hands,” she sings in “Treacherous,” her voice rising to a threatening power: “I will follow you, follow you home,” she cries, over and over again.

Red has more than a few surprises, and the most startling song on the album is “Holy Ground,” produced by Bhasker: A storming drum beat brings a sense of urgency that Swift’s sprawling soft-rock productions have rarely had. But the lyrics are classic Swift, with a couplet that’s brilliantly tight and so obvious it seems like it should have been the hook in a thousand pop songs already: “Tonight I’m gonna dance for all that we’ve been through/But I don’t wanna dance if I’m not dancing with you.” Equally luminous is “The Lucky One,” a meditation on fame (presumably inspired by Joni Mitchell, who Swift is slated to portray in an upcoming biopic) that marries a ’60s girl group rhythm with lyrics about the vicissitudes of celebrity, performing a nifty third-act trick of turning observation into introspection.

If some of those flirtations with other genres sound less like Swift, there are ballads, too, that sound more quintessentially Swift than anything she’s ever recorded. Both collaborations — with Ed Sheeran on the acoustic strummer “Everything Has Changed,” and with Snow Patrol‘s Gary Lightbody on “The Last Time” — are effective, and the not-gonna-call listlessness of “I Almost Do” breaks up the pop nicely. And yet, it’s the tense “All Too Well” that hits the hardest: Swift drops the devastating image, “We’re dancing around the kitchen in the refrigerator light,” before reaching an almost hysterical unraveling with the despondent cry, “I’m a crumpled up piece of paper lying here.” It’s dramatic, but with Swift, it always is. That’s a good thing.

The Best Song Wasn’t The Single: If “22″ is released as a pop single and given the proper promotion, it’ll be a worldwide smash. Not only is the hook ironclad and the spunky production made for radio, she nails twentysomething angst with the lyric “We’re happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time / It’s miserable and magical.” It’s better than a thousand indie records that are much cooler than hers.

Pops Like: All the Taylor Swift songs you’ve ever heard, grown-up and better than you remember them.

Best Listened To: In Hyannis Port. (Nashville works too, though.)

Full Disclosure: I’ve been saying for years that Taylor Swift is the best songwriter of her generation, and Red does nothing to dissuade me.

Rating: 4.5/5

http://idolator.com/7210192/taylor-s...d-album-review