Event records, like their cinematic blockbuster counterparts, are an increasingly rare breed. Blame the internet, blame slow-drip release strategies, blame the fact that there aren’t many superstars left...blame whoever or whatever you want. Then watch as ‘1989’, album five from Taylor Swift, crashes into view, treating this year’s chart stats as Godzilla might an unsuspecting city.
This is the next phase in Swift's much-heralded pop reinvention, an album through which she's seeking to extricate herself altogether from the world of Music Row. It's a process that picked up pace on 'Red', a record that balanced ever-decreasing nods to her country roots with a murderers’ row of singles in I Knew You Were Trouble, 22 and We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, all pop hits of chart-levelling potency and melodic sophistication.
While Welcome To New York, the opening song here, eventually amounts to little more than advertising campaign fluff, the postcard streets of Swift’s adopted hometown do present the crux of what '1989' is all about: "Everyone here was someone else before."
Duly the co-writers who helped to bring the pop on ‘Red’ are back, with Max Martin and Shellback answering the bell, along with some fresh blood in Ryan Tedder, Fun.’s Jack Antonoff and Imogen Heap.
Swift, though, prevents ‘1989’ from becoming a series of retreads or synth soundalikes. One of the beauties of star wattage is the ability to turn magpie and come up with something fresh, and this is a collection that plays that to the hilt.
Along the way there are cues taken from the neon cool of Drive, hat tips to the Instagram world of Lana Del Rey, beats that could belong to Lorde and a boatload of ‘80s worship to complement the title. What’s apparent across the board is how easy Swift makes the whole thing look, with any flashes of recognition washed away by a blend of wide-eyed enthusiasm, sharp observations and hard-won steely resolve.
Throughout she is one step ahead of the bad boys and critics that dot the lyric sheet, placing full stops on romances ahead of time, toying with her good girl reputation and offering, almost universally red-lipped, kiss offs to those on the outside peering in.
On Wildest Dreams, she goes as far as to sketch out a memory for a lover to cling to in future when he’s, we can safely assume, little more than a footnote in Swift’s story: “Say you’ll remember me, standing in a nice dress, staring at the sunset. Red lips and rosy cheeks, say you’ll see me again, even if it’s just in your wildest dreams.”
As Swift exists in a world wreathed in subtext and over-analysis, her every move pored over and reinterpreted, the pointed, pithy sign offs here serve as pins with which to burst some bubbles and to dismiss the attendant celebrity bullshit. This is, after all, a pop record. Economy is the point of the exercise and not once does Swift become bogged down. She is, as Shake It Off informs us, “lightning on her feet”.
It’s a shame, then, that her charm can’t rescue the whole enterprise. There are weak links on ‘1989’ - see Welcome To New York, Bad Blood, even Shake It Off - that its highs can’t always carry, an issue that also plagued its predecessor. When it’s good, it’s very good. When it’s not it’s just fine. And you get the feeling that ‘just fine’ isn’t something Taylor Swift wants to settle for.
But in Blank Space, Style, Wildest Dreams, I Know Places and Out Of The Woods she displays songwriting smarts that are beyond many of her megastar peers. There is a sense that ‘1989’ is the start of something very, very big. Forget country, hello pop.
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