Taylor Swift’s New Album, ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Could Use an Editor: Review

Swift doesn’t name names, but she drops plenty of bold hints about coming out of a long-term cross-cultural relationship that’s gone cold (the heartbreaking “So Long, London”), briefly meeting a tattooed bad boy who raises the hackers of the most critical people in her life (the crazy-eyed “But Dad, I love her”) and starting fresh with someone who makes her sing – ahem – football metaphors (weightlessness “ The Alchemy”). The subject of “The Anthology’s” standout track, another member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a high school bully, is there in the strange capitalization of the title: “thank you aIMee.”

At times the album is a return to form. Her first two songs are a powerful reminder of how viscerally Swift can invoke the glowing delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsating, frosty duet with Post Malone, is cool and controlled until lines like “I love you, it’s ruining my life” prompt the song to melt and shine. Best of all, the chatty, radiant title track, on which Swift’s voice glides over fluid keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly comparing herself and her lover to bolder poets before concluding: “It’s not the Chelsea Hotel, we are modern idiots. » Many Swift songs get lost in the dense thickets of their own vocabulary, but here the zany peculiarity of the lyrics: chocolate bars, names winking at friends, a reference to pop songwriter Charlie . Puth?! – is strangely humanizing.

For all its breadth, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a curiously insular album, often lulled by the familiar amniotic beat of Jack Antonoff’s production. (The National’s Aaron Dessner, who lends a more muted, organic sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write five tracks on the debut album and the majority of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift have worked together since he was contributed to her hit 2014 album “1989,” and he became her most constant collaborator. There’s a sonic uniformity to much of “The Tortured Poets Department,” though—wispy backgrounds, gently percussive synths, drum machine beats that lock Swift into clipped, warbling staccato—that suggest their partnership has become too comfortable and risks becoming obsolete.

As the album progresses, Swift’s lyricism begins to seem unbridled, imprecise, and unnecessarily verbose. Breathtaking lines overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Midnights,” the internal rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Camera flashes, welcome shots, collect the matches, throw the ashes off the ledge,” intones she says in a bouncy cadence on “Fresh Out the Slammer.” one of many songs that lean too heavily on routine prison metaphors. Narcotic imagery is another source of inspiration for some of Swift’s most mundane and distressing writing: “Florida,” apparently, “is a hell of a drug.” If you say so!

This song, however, is one of the best on the album – a thunderous collaboration with pop witch Florence Welch, which blows like a breath of fresh air and allows Swift to tap into a more theatrical and dynamic aesthetic . “Guilty as Sin?”, another fine entry, is rare Antonoff production that frames Swift’s vocals not in stiff electronics but in a ’90s soft-rock atmosphere. On these tracks in particular, images Clear Swiftians emerge: the “messy kiss on a lover’s lips,” friends in their thirties who “all smell like weed or little babies.”