Review Summary: …trying to keep it lit but she made it rain aggressively
Only few can deny that “folklore” and “evermore” had set a stage for Taylor to become the greatest among her peers, in terms of their status as a singer-songwriter. To keep the fire burning, she constantly brought up songs she had held in the closet for years in her own versions of “Fearless” and “Red”, inviting some old-mad-stans to listen back to the songs she re-recorded and some critics to write to her own advantage in the process. As she drifts away from the musical direction she had established in her last two studio albums, Taylor formulated a style that follows those of the recipes she had written five and three years ago. Keeping it lit, she hyped the release all over the internet but as it hits midnight, October 21st, it rained so hard that it instantly puts out the flames she had kept for three years.
Midnights offers a few of her lyrical mess built around on some of the bland overproduced synths that she and Jack Antonoff had been working over. I know that Taylor wants to offer her fans another creative appeal that would please her fans, an appeal that would devoid the elements that folklore established, but this is a big disappointment for everyone who expected that it will be her new masterpiece, it’s not. This is far different from that singer-songwriter flex of her last two albums, even it doesn’t come close to that vibrant pop power she had created in the first 10 tracks of Lover, excluding the fifth and seventh track. Moreover, it equates to worst tracks of reputation, Lover, and evermore.
The album’s inability to create a musical space for listeners makes it more of a noise, an annoying one, than a sound you can jam in. Instead of developing herself more as a singer-songwriter, she threw in some of her worst songs, Bejeweled, Labyrinth, Karma, and …Question? which gives off the core of her worst songwriting, melody structuring, and musical composition, recycling the sounds that horrendously built the worst in reputation. As the album progresses, all throughout the 13 tracks, she kept throwing out lyrics that are dreadful and forgettable, in my opinion. Furthermore, Jack did a bad job in producing the songs in the album, making it even more intriguing than it should be. The abusive use of synths and electronic sounds in this album crafted a distortion in her status as a musician that would take more than folklore to repair.
Moreover, some songs might have been better if were processed further. Take Midnight Rain, for example, which have been great and beautiful and grows even prettier as it progresses, both lyrically and instrumentally, but as it ends with its outro, the lyrical flow of the song seem to have fell apart and seems to be unfinished.
Midnights might have been a head-scratcher for it’s entire play-through, but this is her most cohesive album since 1989, building its sonic aspects on a mellow, glimmering synth-pop. In addition, there are songs that would leave a mark on the listeners. Songs like Anti-Hero and Sweet Nothing might not be something you’ll live up to at your first listen but as you go deeper with these tracks with their productions and narratives, it will eventually grow more beautifully.
Midnights sounds like an aggressive attempt to return back to pop. Taylor had really lost her songwriting magic on this one, and this is probably one of the worst albums in terms of its narrative styles and production quality. It was a bad idea for her to shift her musical direction without thinking through what should have made the album creative on most parts. The album would have been better with the inclusion of some tracks in the 3am edition and exclusion of some of the standard tracks. However, the flames have been washed out and we can’t keep it lit anymore.
