Review Summary: Taylor's tenth is an album with enough goodwill and good ideas to avoid being a total disaster, but it's the first true sign of stagnation in her legendary career.
Taylor is just as much a tactician as she is a musician. For all her many, many missteps over the years, she has always seemed to have held some sort of trump card to shut up the doubters, or at least drown them out with the roaring applause from her passionate fanbase. When she dipped her toes into pop music on
Red, she delivered the career highlight that was “All Too Well” and sprinkled just enough country throughout to assure everyone that she knew damn well how to do that still. When she jumped headfirst in that direction and teased
1989 with some shaky singles like “Shake It Off” and “Bad Blood”, the rest of the album rattled off winners like it was a long lost Greatest Hits collection. After an extremely public feud with Kimye in which she improbably found herself on the losing end and dropped the eye-rolling “Look What You Made Me Do”, Taylor’s
Reputation was ultimately saved with a surprisingly heartfelt collection of electro-ballads that were much more confessional and self-aware than the black dresses and snake emojis let on. After losing the battle for her masters, she dropped perhaps the worst one-two punch of her career with the Sesame Street Episode in song form that was “ME!” and the homophobic “You Need to Calm Down”, she released arguably her most varied collection of songs on
Lover that, while largely uneven, showed we had not yet seen everything in her designer bag of tricks quite yet. And if that was not enough to quell the haters, she dropped two (!!) surprise albums in the quarantine year that stripped her of nearly all the electronics she had acquired over the last decade and went for a far more traditional folksy route that was lauded by fans and critics alike.
Seriously, betting on Taylor Swift to lose is just throwing your money away.
And yet, I arrive at
Midnights scratching my head and wondering if this winning improbable winning streak is continuing and maybe it is
I who is in the wrong when it doesn’t hit me with the same wave of elation and heartbreak as her tunes usually bring. I’m not, of course, but it’s not every day that you see a god bleed, so of course I’m going to rub my eyes and pinch my skin just to make sure that this is the reality that we live in.
One would be forgiven for thinking that Taylor would continue somewhat in the direction that
Folklore and
Evermore conquered with a slightly more upbeat or, dare I say, rock sound given the vintage 70’s aesthetic she teased out in photographs and appearances. Instead, her tenth album finds itself adrift in her own mythology, wallowing in the choppy currents of
Reputation and
Lover’s worst characteristics, both sonically and lyrically. The former is best represented by career lowlight “Vigilante ***”, which is one of the worst Billie Eilish impersonations this side of Gayle and the latter by “Karma”, which is just as up to task for that dubious title with its jaw-droppingly terrible chorus that maybe would’ve been charming coming from someone a decade her junior, but inspires nothing but groans coming from someone who is less than three years away from being eligible to run for president.
But maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here. It’s not as if there aren’t nuggets of gold to be mined here. The record starts off on a high-note with the wonderfully dreamy “Lavender Haze”, which sounds just as lush and dreamy as that name would suggest. It unfortunately implies a far better record that doesn’t exist until a few tracks later on the delicately beautiful, uh, “duet” with Lana Del Rey, “Snow On the Beach”. Taylor flexes her trademark lyricism of delirious bloodrush by describing the feelings of new romance as something as nonsensical as seeing snow on the beach -”weird, but ***ing beautiful.” “Midnight Rain” conjures up similar vivid imagery of pacing back and forth for a recently lost connection of the pitter patter of rain in the dead of night. “Sweet Nothing” is arguably the best song here, with its almost nursery-rhyme melody and achingly beautiful sentiments like “You’re in the kitchen hummin’/All that you ever wanted from me was nothing.”
But that’s where the good ends. The rest of the album offers little in the way of melody or lyricis, and in fact finds Taylor regressing heavily in both departments. Find me someone who can recall the melodies from either “You’re On Your Own, Kid” or “Labyrinth” and I’ll find you a liar. The elegance and wit of her words frequently goes out the window when she, again at 32 years old, puts dramatic emphasis on bad words like “dickhead” or, again, paints herself as the snake emoji villainness for the upteenth time. There are also plenty of instances where the lyrics read more like poorly translated subtitles like on “Maroon”:
“How’d we end up on the floor, anyway?” you say
“Your roommate’s cheap-ass secret top rose, that’s how”
It’s difficult to reconcile that this is the same woman who penned the effortless poetry of “Delicate” or the stratospheric “Style” when many of these songs reek of effort and pushing against brick walls.
Midnights is ostensibly about thirteen different sleepless nights that she has had, but many of the tracks come across as more anonymous or fictitious than the actually fictitious tales she elegantly penned on her last two folksy efforts. Normally I would take the easy route and suggest that this collection sounds like outtakes and discarded material, but puzzling enough the songs on offer in the special 3AM edition sound far more interesting and mature than what’s on offer in the main attraction suggesting that maybe the time was correct, but maybe the execution was in a different timezone.
Midnights is an album with enough good ideas and built on enough goodwill to avert total disaster -it’s more her
Solar Power than it is her
Witness, but it’s perhaps the first true stagnation of her obviously legendary career. I am not betting against her bouncing back with far more ambitious records -again, that is simply a losing proposition- but let’s hope she does not choose to linger on this one for very long. Like the actual time on the clock,
Midnights is a record that is best to sleep through.
