Certainly, "The Archer" basks within the glow of its retro analog synths, dredging up memories of both "Out of the Woods" and "Heart and Soul," yet its iciness isn't the primary color on Lover. By the time “It’s Nice to Have a Friend” arrives on Lover, her seventh and most epic album, Taylor Swift has entered uncharted territory. Promoters of Controversial Chainsmokers Concert Fined $20,000, Flashback: Van Halen Play ‘Panama’ at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards, Stevie Nicks Joins TikTok, Nods to Viral ‘Dreams’ Challenge, Stevie Wonder Releases First New Music in 15 Years, Broken Promises: How Trump Betrayed the Autoworkers of Youngstown, Ohio, Harry Styles Is a Rock God and a Gentleman on ‘Fine Line’, Blink 182 Sound Self-Aware and Mature on ‘Nine’, Post Malone Keeps His Unstoppable Roll Going on ‘Hollywood’s Bleeding’. Lover is a fabulous record, full of super-fun standout pop hits that make your heart burst. “Lover,” her reassuringly strong seventh album, is a palate cleanse, a recalibration and a reaffirmation of old strengths. Sitting in a hot tub on “Saturday Night Live,” Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch stole the sobriquet “love-ah” from the lexicon of acceptable terms of endearment — and, by golly, Taylor Swift is reaching into that oily water and stealing it back. Leo takes a proverbial volleyball to the face on “The Man,” a usefully blunt indictment of double standards, and the dub-inflected “London Boy” counts all the ways she “fancies” her boyfriend Joe Alwyn. It's not bragging if it's true. Taylor Swift proves again that knows pop music more than any of her peers by creating an album about the complexity of love,from the opening. But nevertheless it feels like an epiphany: free and unhurried, governed by no one concept or outlook, it represents Swift at her most liberated, enjoying a bit of the freedom she won for her cohort. Thankfully, that’s mainly it for the sassy, winking Swift. Hard and steely, Reputation announced the arrival of an adult Taylor -- a conscious maturation that didn't bother disguising its seams. Swift smartly balances these pieces of pure pop with songs that tap into a deep reservoir of complex feelings. Produced mostly with ubiquitous pop whisperer Jack Antonoff, it’s full of low-lying synthesizer pulses and reverbed beats that can feel more like scaffolding than full songs. Listen closely to "The Man," and it becomes clear the song is neither a boast nor a manifesto but rather a bit of clear-eyed anger at institutional sexism. An album where the filler and the nuggets struggle for supremacy. - On the terrific “Cruel Summer,” written with Antonoff and Annie Clark (a.k.a. In “I Think He Knows,” she’s “skipping down 16th Avenue,” suggesting that Nashville’s Music Row still has a place in her heart, if not her sound. It oozes with Swift’s much more palatable upbeat sass. She’s 29, but she still writes metaphors about prom dresses and homecoming queens. The theme of Taylor Swift’s Lover is right there in the title. Swift does find some things to get mad about in “Lover”; it’s just not boys. 26 In This Article: When she emerged as an activist for gay rights and the Equality Act earlier this year, you could sense the disappointment beneath the rallying, and “Miss Americana” shows that this grappling wasn’t a one-off. These medical and political malignancies make only cameo appearances on an otherwise exuberant album, but invoking them does bring into sharper relief why we maybe need lovers now more than ever, and why ballads like “Afterglow” and “Daylight” have her trying to figure out — in public — how to use love as a scalpel, not a bludgeon. Meanwhile, there’s that blissed out, mathematically specific status update embedded in the title track: “I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, but I want ’em all.”. Happily, this includes a hefty dose of silliness: never mind the effervescence of "Paper Rings," the closest thing to pure bubblegum Taylor has ever recorded, the inclusion of a spoken introduction from Idris Elba on "London Boy" is giddily goofy. It’s like the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a long turbulent journey through outer (and, naturally, inner) space culminates in the sudden appearance of a planet-sized fetus. She uses the word “shade” twice, up from once on reputation. We want to hear from you! When the album dropped, I sampled all the songs on Amazon and loved the total sound of it! On an album this long, there is equal room for good and bad, and you’re always equidistant from either one no matter what track you’ve reached. But it also feels like a record she made for herself, unburdened by external expectations and her own past. Made mainly in collaboration with Jack Antonoff, female songwriting ally nonpareil, the album’s dominant sound is sleekly updated Eighties pop-rock. Like Red or Speak Now, Lover is a sprawling scrapbook of invisible personal bookmarks, an escapist fantasy about a real-life celebrity boyfriend, a shrewd self-mythology disguised as a benevolent offering. I’ve thought about “ME!” every day for four months; it still sounds like a musical number taken out of context, just unearned celebratory fanfare without plot or character development, so dead-eyed it’s spooky. The result is a dreamy record that makes good use of its stylistic freedom. All this publication's reviews; Read full review; Variety. Here, Swift has found an ex truly worth writing about: the naive spirit of national optimism. Antonoff in particular is peaking as a specialist in quirky Top 40 fodder; equal to the charms of “Paper Rings” and “I Think He Knows” is “Cruel Summer” — co-written by another client, St. Vincent — with vocoder background voices making it sound like a greatest hit of the ’80s, even if it’s not actually a Bananarama cover. © 2020 CBS Interactive Inc. All rights reserved. Ultimately, Lover is overstuffed and meandering, but serves as a positive reprieve from her past struggles in the public eye, and represents an artist at the peak of her creativity, power, and—one hopes—continued romantic bliss. Three minutes later, her tender testimony of new faith is outshined by the terrific “False God,” a moody sophistipop meditation on transatlantic romance where worship (“Religion’s in your lips… the altar is my hips”) sounds more like a metaphor for…. Sign up for our newsletter. 26 Critic Reviews, Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America. K!” interjections in her best cheerleader voice. Swift has always been vulnerable, of course. It's also a very consistent album, where the songs fit together in terms of sound. Female pop stars since Madonna have been expected to constantly reinvent themselves, lest it seem like they’re aging — an impossible standard that vexed Swift contemporaries like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.). For two and a half minutes, Swift regresses past all the drama and heartache she’s cataloged since her teen years to curl up in a weird little pocket of beauty. She’s unburdened by love, and that explosive happiness makes itself present across this record. The maturation through Taylor Swift’s career has also shown her react to personal change in real time. Instead, she mostly goes for the big moods. Swift released her seventh album, Lover , an 18-track ode to remaining positive, hopeful and open about your true feelings. Pitchfork is the most trusted voice in music. Lover, in contrast, is a bit messier, almost defiantly so. i truly stan. On her seventh album, Taylor Swift is a little wiser and a lot more in love. For one thing, it’s the 17th song here, and none of her previous albums have run more than 16 tracks. "The Man" isn't the only place where Swift tackles political issues. Driving While Black: Race, Space and Mobility in America. But there’s only a modicum of “Kanye content,” if you will, on this new album, as breakup songs fade further into the distance. ho!” and a key change for a jittery bit of Cars-meets-Eddie Money-meets-Go-Go’s delight. based on “Soon You’ll Get Better” was recorded with Dixie Chicks, but giving the country-radio exiles a feature isn’t the point — the song is note-perfect ballad for Swift’s mother, whose cancer returned earlier this year.
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