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The Performative Poets Department
On her new album, Taylor Swift is restless, fed up, and a little too aware of what everyone wants.
“Fresh Out the Slammer” frames a cohabitation on life support as Fed time: “Handcuffed to the spell I was under / For just one hour of sunshine / Years of labor, locks, and ceilings / In the shade of how he was feeling.” Placing these songs near “So Long, London” — which namechecks the site of the Alwyn family’s Christmas polar-bear plunge — excites. The two-note R&B cadence of “Down Bad” recalls “Midnight Rain”; the one in the Seussian “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” resembles the bridge in Reputation ’s “King of My Heart.” Swift plays it straight in her duets with Florence Welch and Post Malone, selling unadorned emotion while her guests lean into the eccentricities in their vocal deliveries. The Antonoff cuts reach for the synth-inflected gravity of broken-hearted ’80s rockers like Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark,” or “Never Gonna Be the Same Again” off Bob Dylan’s Empire Burlesque, while seeking common ground between the autumnal folklore and evermore and the brisk “Cruel Summer.” But then the Dessner tracks affix a more alluring(Taylor’s Version) onto the main album with focused extras that address the same ideas while dispensing with the coating of self-aware slickness.
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