Midnights - Taylor Swift: Review
Taylor Swift
really needs no introduction. She's one of the biggest stars in all of music whose various eras, controversies, and commercial successes have been documented ad nauseum for the past 15 years. Midnights is her 10th record which comes loosely themed around all the songs being conceptualized late at night and promising a return to pop after the folk departure of her previous two records.
Review by Lav:
When I started this blog in 2016, I was a Taylor Swift "hater". I didn't actually hate Taylor Swift but my own reputation among my friends and the people I interacted with online didn't have room for that nuance, but it was when Taylor started evaluating her own Reputation that my tone shifted. For the first time, I found myself genuinely enjoying her music and more importantly, interested in her as an artist. Despite following that up with a very putrid record in Lover I think Taylor Swift has generally been on a much more enjoyable artistic path through her past 5 records than her first 5. folklore impressed me and almost everyone else who heard it and it's glorified B-Side collection evermore had some decent songs too. Even though Taylor's Version didn't make me appreciate the nearly unbearable Fearless anymore, her revisiting of Red was significantly more enjoyable.
So here we are. Taylor is the biggest star on earth and after finding success shifting genres and then remaking some of her old music it was time to make a return to her pop standards. Would it be better than Lover? Is it even possible to be worse? This is Taylor Swift's Midnights and despite being extremely inconsistent and having some very poorly thought out ideas, it's somewhat better than Lover.
Let's start with the good first because despite the complaining I'll do later, this record really does have a number of highlights. If the opening song were called anything else, I would probably just say it's solid and admire that it gets the whole album started off with a statement of intent about the moodier style o pop it's delivering, but it's called Lavender Haze, so I love it. I mean come on, it's called LAVENDER Haze it's like it was made to be on my Instagram stories for the next month. Anti-Hero has become the record's de-facto lead single and it's easy to see why because so many of the record's sonic and narrative themes are at its core. It's also one of the better-written songs here that sees Taylor framing her own image with some level of nuance for the first time since Reputation but it also comes with one of those dramatic build-ups that reminds me of one of my favorite Taylor songs ever, Getaway Car.
This is another Taylor record where the best song of the bunch is so easy to pick out because it's leaps and bounds better than everything else here, unsurprisingly that song is Vigilante Shit. I've been waiting for 5 years for this Taylor to pick up the phone again and she doesn't waste the opportunity. From the icy stark electronic beat to the rumbling bass Taylor finally sounds like a badass again. While the opening cat eye lyric is silly and I can't imagine how Taylor actually finds it cool, she picks up the slack big time throughout the rest of the song.
Speaking of picking up the slack the record ends on a pretty solid note thankfully. Sweet Nothing gets off to a rough start with a Dr. Suess-ass opening refrain that makes me want to turn it off immediately any time I hear it. But it gets a lot better from there with backing brass and keys that are perfect additions to the song showing more restraint than Jack Antonoff has in years. Mastermind is the closing track and Taylor Swift kind of takes credit for the big bang on the song. She may or may not be aware of that but it's an interesting track regardless. I like the cosmic little key phrases and distant bumping percussion. Even though it doesn't have any explicit extra value as a closer I do like the song a lot.
Those are the big highlights but there are some songs here and there that manage to work okay. Labyrinth is painfully boring at points but it's one of the best production jobs on the album and one of the only songs that genuinely pulls off the record's attempt at cloudy moodiness. I've also grown to like You're On Your Own, Kid even if the songwriting leans really heavily into Taylor, who is obviously playing the narrator, being consequentially separated from all the important events at its core. It's one of the catchier tracks and the instrumental hasn't been fully Antonoffed so it still has some life.
One of my issues with the record that pops up on many songs, even ones I like, is Taylor's sugary pop instincts getting in the way of the aesthetic that the record is shooting for. Maroon is the best example of a song that's almost good, but it could pass as a 1989 slow jam and I mean that in all the wrong ways. Question...? has a lot of the same problems except it's clearly a song written for and meant to be enjoyed by 16-year-olds. Taylor has every right to do that but once some of the background cheering and voices come in during the hook it gets so disgustingly patronizing that I can't imagine anyone being seriously inspired by it.
Elsewhere on the record, there are just some extremely bad ideas the worst of which, and the one song I can't believe was actually released publicly is Midnight Rain. Taylor approaches this track like a mysterious tears on the window sill whisper ballad but tries to do it with this gross vocal pitching and awful background vocals on the hook. It's like she thinks she's Frank Ocean or something pulling off a sound that requires some level of artistic mystery or nuance. Someone like Taylor who has spent a decade taking on her drama in explicit detail publicly just feels impossibly phony making a song like this.
The worst part of this entire album is that Taylor Swift is not a good songwriter.
Wait, sorry. Let me try that again. For a long time, I was really confused by why Taylor was hoisted up by the pop music public as if she was some kind of reincarnate of one of the classic great songwriters while simultaneously her songs were full of awful lyrics, paper-thin metaphors, and shitty reframing techniques that ruined entire songs. Then folklore came out and it really felt like at points she was starting to become the songwriter everyone always claimed she was. Turns out she must have used every single good idea she had for that record because we are back to the slop here.
Snow On The Beach has been getting publicly clowned for the cheap marketing gimmick of listing Lana Del Rey as a "feature" when she barely appears on the song at all, justifiably I might add. What it should be getting clowned for WAY more is Taylor thinking that "Like snow on the beach, weird but fucking beautiful" is a real line she should actually use not just in a song, but as its centerpiece. Bejeweled has a similarly terrible concept at its core as a bad girl anthem where Taylor insists that she can still outshine all her contemporaries because she's "Bejeweled", *sigh*. The song itself is terrible but I also can't ignore the fact that instead of carrying the bad girl anthem into the verses she has a totally different take, attacking the institutions that she feels are holding her back which makes it unironically feel like her Joker arc.
The worst offender on the whole record is Karma. Pick a lyric on this song and I promise you it would be the worst lyric on any recent record from one of Taylor's contemporaries. Why she gets a pass for these fundamentally awful and broken songs I have no idea.
Midnights is a mess. It sounds more like a record that was written and recorded in one night than the series of late nights that its concept promises. That gets down to two big flaws, Taylor returning to some of the pop tropes that made her 1989 era so miserable, and Taylor returning to the style of songwriting that could fill an entire albums worth of awful lines throughout her career. Those flaws are so big that I don't even have time to get into the fact that Jack Antonoff once again comes up painfully short on the production end of a very popular album, or the fact that this thing is in no way the sonic or thematic consistency it promised with its title and promotion. There are enough decent track in the mix that pop fans are sure to find a few favorites, and Reputation fans in particular can see Vigilante Shit as a wonderful return to form. But outside of those boundaries Midnights is inconsequential, and all the more inessential for it. 5/10
This is a departure from all the other covers Taylor has done which relied heavily on full composition imagery. I really like this as a physical format on CDs, record sleeves and posters it'll look amazing. I think it falls flat digitally though and this is an album that could've benefitted from an alternate cover for streaming. I love the gradient of the text but it would be nice to see it over a darker and more full composition that was better utilizing the space. As for the image itself, it gets the point across with that film style, I just wish it was larger to appreciate it more. 6.5/10
