Review Summary: One of pop's plastic surgery disasters.
Taylor Swift is odd. Wait, let me rephrase that. Taylor Swift's career is odd. I guess, I could leave it at that, but for a good read I'll elaborate it a bit further. The thing is, the bog-standard teen pop star has to start her career as a little girlie with pigtails – or sexy curves, whatever suits best -, over a dozen songwriters and producers in the background and songs completely stripped of any character. At some point that girlie wants to leave all that behind, unleashes her creativity and since she already sold a few million albums, no one dares to stop her.
Swift kind of turned that upside down. Kicking off her career by bringing back country and not buying into the whole bubblegum and pseudo-r'n'b crap. Of course she still always sang about those not-so-perfect guys and how she's waiting for her Prince Charming. And of course she stuffed her songs with so much schmaltz that even John Denver wouldn’t have dared to write some of her lines. Yet, the thing is: It was honest. She was that naïve country girl without a clue of anything. And it was damn catchy at times.
But with every album she took another step into that big, big soulless pop world. Upside:
"Red" presented her at her most diverse up to then. Downside: She kind of lost what made Taylor Swift Taylor Swift.
"1989" prolongs that in the least fashionable way.
That's why you don't get some nice guitar riff or a banjo to welcome you, but instead the pounding electronic beat and 80s synths of
Welcome To New York. Kind of a slap in the face, mostly because neither the sound nor the incredibly dumbed-down message – the title says it all – suit her in any way. The beat is tiring rather than energetic, her use of synthesizers is so unbelievably simple that it isn't anything but irritating and boring and her vocals rather sound like Katy Perry than herself. An underwhelming opener, nothing more yet, no problem.
And really, a song like
Style features a nice jangly riff and almost wins you over with its electronic understatement in its verses, just to throw in the least fitting chorus, packed with auto-tuned vocals. But Swift manages to get that new sound under control at least a few times.
All You Had To Do Was Stay embraces the unobtrusiveness of the more organic beat, features way more melodic vocals and doesn't go overboard with the underlying synths. The more energetic side presents itself properly with the funky riff and the dry beat of
I Wish You Would. While the song loses its momentum in the overtly crammed chorus, it is one of the few reminders of Swifts earlier up-tempo tunes and their infinite catchiness.
But one has to wait long, unbelievably long, to find something on here that would deserve to be labelled as a great pop tune. The easy-going
How You Get The Girl could be one of them, harkening back to the carefree days of
You Belong With Me or
Mean. And for the first time on
"1989" you find yourself in a position, where your foot just wants to move along to the beat and you might even dare to sing along to the chorus. One could almost think, Swift is on a roll, looking at the successful exploration of a more burdened sound of
I Know Places that follows shortly after. The sparse piano and the active beat work well together, form a slightly colder atmosphere than one is used to from her mellower moments. A little bit of depth is in the air, if only for a moment or two.
Nevertheless there's a simple reason, why one has to wait quite long for these better songs. There are just too many useless ones thrown in before. Not bad, not necessarily. But the self-adulating lead single
Shake It Off already made quite clear that Swift really isn't aiming for anything special with these songs. A slick production, beats that aren't new, yet not old enough to annoy you, and synths without any character. And of course there are no guitars in sight for most of the time, who the hell would dare to throw in those? Altogether ingredients for a forgettable pop record.
Usually when there is more to explore, it isn't for the better. And that's really her fault more than anyone else's. For one thing, Swift traded her at times quite imaginative storytelling for pop banalities full of romantic platitudes everyone's heard tons of times before and without the ability to fill all the room these songs offer. Back then one got her version of Romeo and Juliet, a crashed wedding or a revenge song, filled with kitsch many couldn't stand. But all the nice little lines one could remember are gone and replaced by songs that almost bore you just with their titles, such as
Out Of The Woods or
Bad Blood.
The other big issue is the obvious change in her vocal style. Swift isn't exactly a highly gifted singer, but her idea of overcoming that is giving her vocal volume a boost with the ineffable fashion of auto-tune and multi-layered vocals. Not her best idea, looking at the unnatural performances of, again,
Out Of The Woods or the overdramatic
This Love.
Which in conclusion makes for quite many moments that are too synthetic, too unnatural and overall just mediocre. And for her traditionally good closer, this time in the form of the calmly instrumented and well sung ballad
Clean. Sadly just one of few bright spots on a record elsewhere dominated by the very definition of uninteresting and average pop. Swift has chosen an even poppier and more electronic sound to go for, but while there's no doubt she reinvented herself with
"1989", she definitely didn't do herself any good with this decision. It was inevitable that the quite likeable teenager with only boys in her mind would disappear sooner or later, but Swift could have at least stayed likeable. Instead she ends up in plastic pop heaven. Or hell.
Recommended Tracks:
- All You Had To Do Was Stay
- How You Get The Girl
- I Know Places
