Red
- Taylor Swift
- Band Name: Taylor Swift
- Record Label: Big Machine Records
- Release Date: Oct 22, 2012
- Critic Score
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Nov 13, 201291I like the feisty ones, as I generally do. But "Begin Again" and especially "Stay Stay Stay" stay happy and hit just as hard.
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Oct 19, 201286Red is her most interesting full-length to date, but it probably won't be when all is said and done in her career.
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Oct 24, 201285It's sexy, daring, and complete.
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Oct 24, 201283It's magnificent at times, but it's also complicated and sometimes unfocused.
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Oct 18, 201283One gets the feeling that it's not this guy's love she's after. She's just using him for the breakup songs. This time around, it's getting harder to feel sorry for Swift.
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Jan 23, 201380Hearing Taylor Swift sing makes you remember these things, how you can wax poetic one day about the efficacy of love to change lives permanently for the better, and the next rail about how love leads only to pain and heartache.
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Oct 30, 201280She's constructed something so precise its success seems preordained, but underneath it all, Taylor is still twitchy, which makes Red not just catchy but compelling.
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Oct 26, 201280If you're at a different stage of life than she is, it can be exhausting trying to keep up with the succession of emotions to which she deftly gives voice, but also downright exhilarating.
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Oct 25, 201280Whatever it is, this music is full of adult pleasures.
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Oct 22, 201280As ever, Swift seems to know just the right phrase to pull you inside her break-up narratives.
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Oct 18, 201280Swift has a knack for romance.
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Oct 22, 201275Red is a big record that reaches for Importance and occasionally touches it, filled with well-constructed pop songs Taylor-made for bedroom duets.
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Oct 29, 201270Taken individually, most of the songs are accomplished and engaging (though we could certainly have done without the dreary Sad Beautiful Tragic) but Speak Now was such a coherent work that Red can't help but feel modestly disappointing.
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Oct 25, 201270For all its manufactured essence, Red remains firmly grounded at the crossroads between innocence and experience.
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Oct 24, 201270Money and success can be just as good a fable as Romeo and Juliet, and Swift is deft enough to make a point of and poke fun at her fairytale stardom.
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Oct 24, 201270Red may not be a bona fide country album, but it could very well be a pop masterpiece, more in line with P!nk's latest, The Truth About Love, than even Red's predecessor, Speak Now.
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Oct 23, 201270She's a quick-witted lyricist with a sharp eye.
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Oct 22, 201270It's not Bob Dylan, but the songwriting is leagues ahead of where Swift was as recently as two years ago.
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Oct 18, 201270Whether she's real-talking Jake Gyllenhaal ("We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together") or fantasizing about crashing "a yacht-club party" ... her self-discovery project is one of the best stories in pop. When she's really on, her songs are like tattoos.
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Oct 31, 201260More varied in its offerings, but also more disjointed than her previous work, Red sounds like a transitional album for Swift.
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Oct 22, 201260If Red is ultimately too uneven to be a truly great pop album, its highlights are career-best work for Swift, who now sounds like the pop star she was destined to be all along.
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Oct 19, 201260It's frustrating, then, when Swift reverts back to type. Too many of the songs on this bloated 16-track album revisit the gently strummed verses and characterless choruses of her previous work.
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Oct 24, 201240As it stands for now though, Red is a mixed bag, and it's up to you to sort through the majority-holding bad in order to find the good.