Album review: Taylor Swift, Reputation

NZ Herald·

16 Nov, 2017 12:00 AM3 mins to read

Taylor Swift's Reputation moves between awkward attempts at hip-hop to high-tides of pop perfection. Photo / supplied

Look What You Made Me Do, the first cut we heard from Taylor Swift's new album Reputation, has not aged well. Its clunky lyrics, awkward production and expensive, braggadocios video made the track a certified dud, only worsened by the ensuing choppiness of Reputation's rollout. The next three singles, ... Ready For It, Gorgeous and Call it What You Want, weren't much better.

What's confusing about Reputation is that those four singles are easily the weakest tracks on the record. As a whole, the album offers a number of songs that put Taylor Swift's prowess as a songwriter and pop star on display. Swift has only bettered herself over her past four records, with her embracing of pop music on 2014's 1989 propelling her to super-stardom. The years that followed, however, were distracted by a number of celebrity feuds, of which Swift never seemed able to stay ahead of the curve. Where does a musician go after their best work as an artist, but roughest year as a celebrity?

Reputation is where Swift went; an aggressive heavyweight of an album that draws from a palette of trap, grime and hip-hop. The adoption of the latter element is where many of the record's misfires come from - there are a number of fumbled attempts at rapping, and several times Swift clips her words as though to try fit into a hip-hop vernacular. "I see how this is gon' go," she sings on ... Ready For It; "I do bad things wi' you," on So It Goes ... They're tiny moments, but given Swift has copped backlash before for appropriating black culture, they're memorably cringe-worthy.

Taylor Swift's song-writing excellence is back on display on Reputation. Photo / AP

As on 1989, it's when Swift dives head-first into pop and unleashes unapologetic swells of emotion that Reputation really soars. The aforementioned So It Goes... is a high-tide of feeling, with Swift at her most brazenly sexual - she leaves lipstick on a lover's face and scratches on their back as broad, heady synths pound through the chorus. Don't Blame Me finds gospel rhythms colliding with dubstep "wubs" as Swift goes lyrically darker than ever, "toying with older guys" and likening obsessive love to a drug addiction.

Other tracks slide into old conventions or borrow from tired musical elements. The bombastic I Did Something Bad uses an aggressive trap beat that sounds like it was pulled out of David Guetta's version of 2010, and the shade track This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things sounds like a mash-up between Lorde's Hard Feelings and Avril Lavigne's Complicated. It's on New Year's Day, the closing slow ballad, where Swift reminds us of her musical abilities. It's an exhausting, often gruelling journey to the end, but here we're reminded of her ability to capture emotions in single, tangible moments; "Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognise anywhere," she sings. Reputation is bogged down by excessive attempts to try on new styles, but excellence is found when the old Taylor steps up and returns us to her nuanced, measured song-writing.