Review Summary: Something you can fall in and fall out of love at the same time
Ranging from very exquisite tracks to “I’ll pretend I never heard it” songs, Lover offers a synthetic palette of Taylor Swift’s magnum opus, Red. Five years have passed, many songs from this album still sounds new even though you keep listening to them on repeat. Much of the extremely beautiful tracks from this mushy space sounds are non-washed out and unmuted, and not a Lana worship (with the exception of Miss Americala and the Heartbreak Prince), not like the ones Jack Antonoff produced in Midnights or The Tortured Poets Department.
Gazing upon the purple pink skies of Lover, you’ll see much of beauty and timelessness, then there’s “ME!” and “You Need to Calm Down” that ruined the mood. The first four track run in this album was pretty insane until you stumble over “The Archer” that would put you back to an asylum for hearing music that's so, pretty much…, bad and washed-out.
I will be expecting Taylor to prepare albums that explores the organic-esque of “I Forgot That You Existed”, or the timeless intimate country ballad, “Lover” or the throwback surf-pop-love-anthem “Paper Rings” in the future. However, on the general, the album is still a mix of 80’s to 00’s synth-pop with a late 2010’s electro-pop, which turned out to be excellent. Songs like “Cruel Summer”, “The Man” and “Cornelia Street” stood through the test of time and remained as perfect as they were, despite the dreadful release of her new repetitive synth-pop records that are bleeding our ears left and right.
Lover is not a bad album. If you dig deeper through it’s compositions, it would be Taylor’s best pop record ever if was trimmed down to 12 to 13 of her best cuts for this album. The problem was it’s too long, too reductive (like how "Afterglow" is a ripoff of "Cornelia Street"), and pretty much contains fillers just to meet that 1-hour requirement. The exclusion of ME!, You Need To Calm Down, The Archer, and It’s Nice to Have A Friend will make it her true obra maestra before her folklore and evermore.
