Review: Why Taylor Swift's 'Red' is Just Right

 

WARNING: I'm going to say a lot of good things about Taylor Swift in this post, and I'm pretty sure that's a sign of the apocalypse. Be prepared! By the end of this post, the rapture could very well be upon us.

Taylor Swift is very much the Britney Spears to Carrie Underwood's Christina Aguilera. Are you following? As limitless as Carrie's talents seem to be, the world has clearly chosen Taylor Swift as this generation's stand out starlet, while Carrie is forced to remain content with great success that always takes a back seat to Taylor's immense success. As a huge Carrie Underwood fan, the tips of my fingers burned hotter than Lindsay Lohan's pee when I typed this paragraph. 

So what's so great about Taylor Swift? It's that she's so damn good at suckering everyone in! Even people like me, who have been disgusted by her music for half of a decade. For Taylor Swift, Red is the album that proves that she's a threat and I'm not just talking country music. Pop culture has been completely shaken in a way that we've only seen one other time in the past few years (see Lady Gaga). 

In her fourth diary-turn-best-selling-album, she continues her trend of writing songs about her uncountable one-night-stands relationships, but takes a few moments to step out of her soft-country/pop comfort zone and showcase the symptoms of a future crossover act. Tracks jump from self-conscious indie pity sessions to bubblegum pop bops with dubstep samples to twangy country knee slappers, and most of the time it works. She experimented with dubstep on the Bieber-ish "I Knew You Were Trouble," resulting in one of the years cutest pop songs, but her use of autotune in the same song and in "Red" are slightly uncomfortable.

Where Red triumphs the most is with writing. Perhaps Taylor has been secretly hanging out with Ke$ha, but compared to previous albums, the lyrics seemed to be geared more towards nursery rhyme trickery like catchy repetition. Radio will love it songs like, "Stay Stay Stay" (the title should give you a good idea of how repetitive this song is) and "22" (Carly Rae Jepsen?), which should have been among the first few tracks of the album, instead of the much less exciting "State of Grace." Those are songs that get stuck in your head so much that you have to play them again. For the slower songs, "I Almost Do" and "All Too Well" are the most enthrawling, composed of lyrics so detailed she almost sounds like a psycho stalker.

All-in-all, at 16 tracks, Red is a strong album and for non-fans it may be just good enough to sucker them into giving the album and Taylor a chance. Still, it may not be enough to make them fall in love with her music. It's a fun album, but is still largely targeted towards young girls... but hey, that's where the money is! I would suggest even haters give the album sampler a chance. I'm about 90% sure after that you'll want to hear the whole thing on Spotify, then after a week or two you'll catch yourself shelling out a few bucks to buy it on iTunes. It's not a bad album to have on hand for an off-day at home.

  

(7 out of 10 Stars: For this year, that puts her on par with G.O.O.D. Music's Cruel Summer and just above Justin Bieber's Believe)