Midnights
by Taylor Swift

From cestuneblague TOP 100 COMMENTER 11/10/2022 23:39 | #291210 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

I think how much you're fascinated with everything Taylor Swift- particularly both the icon and what people perceive her as out of the limelight- will go a long way into how you value this album. Because purely taken as a piece of music, it rarely gels into anything substantial. In hindsight, I was harder on Folklore & Evermore on the time which mostly seemed to be about the ballyhooed "I can't believe Taylor INVENTED indie folk music!" overpraise, but it actually felt like a positive exercise to move away (at least for the most part) from all the first-person taylor drama and actually rejigger her interest in character-based songwriting which has always been a much more engaging style than her attempts at meta self-reflection. And again the Songwriting is key, because these often aren't even really full songs, just coasting on the modern snippet-based music trend that a 30-second mood stretched out to the brim is a full idea on it's own right. A lot of it is ressurecting already-dated trends (the endless vocoder use, purring baselines, moody Odd Future and 808 cast-off riffs) as well as some of her own old sounds (particularly the steely synths of 1989, though intentionally fragmented here to emphermal results), which doesn't help that most of the songs still are all Taylor, all the time- a whole lot of humble brags about how personal fallouts and media scrutiny made her the better person, and more record-industry drama BS (which leads to the most tedious attempt at a noirish revenge song anyone could imagine). I donno, there are some highlights, the end couple of songs are pretty solid vintage Taylor with some modern trimmings and "You're On Your Own Kid" is a lyrically strong, more outward look on how the earnest romantic teenage longing of her earliest work has fractured as time passes and pleasing enough I'll completly forgive it rips off the sound of Melodrama's masterpiece "Hard Feelings" (and no blaming Antonoff here, I doubt he was even in the studio here considering the complete auto-pilot production job). Obviously an album that would look more towards the growth of her now adult fanbase and how her music has affected them rather than herself would've been a more interesting prospect, instead we get an album that coasts on what we've heard all Before, both from Taylor and much of the styles that were popular in her heyday. It's not terrible by any means, but perhaps the worst thing Taylor could do is make a terminally uninteresting album that even when spinning you can forget you're even listening to it and realize there's better things to do with your time. (Edited)

From LebowskiRams TOP 100 COMMENTER 10/22/2022 07:30 | #290677 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

A disappointing follow up to Evermore and Folklore. While swapping folk for synth works often, the record meanders with lyricism that is consistently confusing, melodramatic or immature

From RockyRaccoon TOP 100 COMMENTER 10/22/2022 21:51 | #290705 | TOP COMMENT Vote up your preferred comments and the comments with the most votes will be flagged.

It's very Jack Antonoff-y (which as far as I'm concerned, isn't necessarily a bad thing) but definitely a step down from Folklore and Evermore. And if the 3AM edition proves anything, it's that Swift's songs benefit a lot more from Aaron Dessner's production/co-writing than Antonoff's.

All that said, it's all still miles better than her Max Martin era

I thoroughly enjoyed the subdued autumnal cool of 'Midnights' but have to agree with the majority that it's not quite up to the high standards set by 'Folklore' and 'Evermore' despite largely being a better album than most of Swift's earlier works.

This feels like a step backwards in both musical adventurousness and human maturity