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Swift doesn’t identify names, however she drops loads of boldfaced clues about exiting a long-term cross-cultural relationship that has grown chilly (the wrenching “So Long, London”), briefly taking over with a tattooed unhealthy boy who raises the hackles of the extra judgmental folks in her life (the wild-eyed “But Daddy I Love Him”) and beginning contemporary with somebody who makes her sing in — ahem — soccer metaphors (the weightless “The Alchemy”). The topic of probably the most headline-grabbing monitor on “The Anthology,” a fellow member of the Tortured Billionaires Club whom Swift reimagines as a highschool bully, is true there within the title’s odd capitalization: “thanK you aIMee.”
At instances, the album is a return to kind. Its first two songs are potent reminders of how viscerally Swift can summon the flushed delirium of a doomed romance. The opener, “Fortnight,” a pulsing, synth-frosted duet with Post Malone, is chilly and managed till strains like “I like you, it’s ruining my life” encourage the tune to thaw and glow. Even higher is the chatty, radiant title monitor, on which Swift’s voice glides throughout clean keyboard arpeggios, self-deprecatingly evaluating herself and her lover to extra daring poets earlier than concluding, “This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re trendy idiots.” Many Swift songs get misplaced in dense thickets of their very own vocabulary, however right here the goofy particularity of the lyrics — chocolate bars, first-name nods to associates, a reference to the pop songwriter Charlie Puth?! — is unusually humanizing.
For all its sprawl, although, “The Tortured Poets Department” is a curiously insular album, typically cradled within the acquainted, amniotic throb of Jack Antonoff’s manufacturing. (Aaron Dessner of the National, who lends a extra muted and natural sensibility to Swift’s sound, produced and helped write 5 tracks on the primary album, and nearly all of “The Anthology.”) Antonoff and Swift have been working collectively since he contributed to her blockbuster album “1989” from 2014, and he has turn out to be her most constant collaborator. There is a sonic uniformity to a lot of “The Tortured Poets Department,” nevertheless — gauzy backdrops, gently thumping synths, drum machine rhythms that lock Swift right into a clipped, chirping staccato — that means their partnership has turn out to be too comfy and dangers rising stale.
As the album goes on, Swift’s lyricism begins to really feel unrestrained, imprecise and unnecessarily verbose. Breathless strains overflow and lead their melodies down circuitous paths. As they did on “Midnights,” inside rhymes multiply like recitations of dictionary pages: “Camera flashes, welcome bashes, get the matches, toss the ashes off the ledge,” she intones in a bouncy cadence on “Fresh Out the Slammer,” one among a number of songs that lean too closely on rote jail metaphors. Narcotic imagery is one other inspiration for a few of Swift’s most trite and head-scratching writing: “Florida,” apparently, “is one hell of a drug.” If you say so!
That tune, although, is among the album’s greatest — a thunderous collaboration with the pop sorceress Florence Welch, who blows in like a gust of contemporary air and permits Swift to harness a extra theatrical and dynamic aesthetic. “Guilty as Sin?,” one other pretty entry, is the uncommon Antonoff manufacturing that frames Swift’s voice not in inflexible electronics however in a ’90s soft-rock ambiance. On these tracks specifically, crisp Swiftian photographs emerge: an imagined lover’s “messy top-lip kiss,” 30-something associates who “all scent like weed or little infants.”
