I swear I had no intention to pair these uh dissimilar albums, but after turning with relief to the briar patch of instrumentation in which Still House Plants delight after an hour in Taylor Swift’s paved parking lot of an album.
Taylor Swift – The Tortured Poets Department
With critical consensus hardening around this commercial juggernaut, I keep waiting for a personal capitulation to this consensus that won’t come. Two listens into the first album last week (I haven’t paid much attention to the second; I don’t get paid to write this shit) and I slotted it as a return after the vaporous Midnights, which nevertheless produced in “Anti-Hero” her first and best radio hit since the pre-pandemic years. She, Jack Antonoff, and Aaron Dessner have mixed her vocals up, in large part because she has pungent things to say about men and such.
The problem, as Damon Krukowski noted in an essential review, comes with the rest of Antonoff’s production decisions, specifically to turn the listening experience into “a flat, featureless soundscape with one lone figure, singing words.” The Tortured Poets Department isn’t a headphone listen in that discrete filigrees pop out of the songs: when those filigrees do pop out it’s because the rest of the song depends on Swift’s lyrics and her delivery of them. The drum loop in the title track, the baritone guitar in “Fresh Out the Slammer,” the sequencer in “I Can Do With a Broken Heart” — I hold on fast like they’re a helicopter rescuing me from a burning skyscraper. Fatigue? Maybe. The mirror-upon-mirror-reflections of the Taylor Swift persona in “Clara Bow” — a worthwhile sequel to “Blank Space” — deserves more than cellos echoing her melody line (Glenn Kotche gets an instrumental credit for, tapping the Keurig, I guess).
I don’t hear exhaustion. I hear comfort.
Still House Plants – If I don’t make it, I love u
They titled a song “More More Faster,” only one-thirds accurate. “More more,” though! Yes. This London threesome specialize in the electric strum; Finlay Clark whorls his lines up and down and around while Jess Hickie-Kallenbach stretches notes under the illusion that she and Clark occupy infinite space. “Pant” is the exemplar: guitar making splat-splat-splat noises like paint against the wall while Hickie-Kallenbach tugs against the beat with noises as much Flowers of Romance-era John Lydon as Diamanda Galás. On “Probably” she stretches vowels almost to the breaking. David Kennedy is the most valuable player: the drummer’s sinister hesitations in the first half call to mind David Bowie’s advice to Tony Newman to play on “Candidate” as if he were “a French drummer boy watching his first guillotining.” At the 2:30 point it’s the blade itself, mad with bloodlust. I will not deny the difficulty and even perversity of this album, but after a half dozen increasingly immersive listens I’ve grown to anticipate every ululation (Jenn Pelly and Joshua Minsoo Kim also offer insights). “Deeply sensitive, deeply watchful, mostly head down” is the lyric to remember: a description, a manifesto.
Humanizing The Vacuum 