Taylor Swift Embraces Pop on '1989': Album Review

For almost a decade, Taylor Swift has been waging, and winning, a war, smiling all the while.

Country music has been - was - a natural enemy for her: hidebound, slow moving, lousy with machismo. She could break the rules and make people nervous simply by showing up. And yet country was also a hospitable host body. She faced almost no direct competition there, and it's a genre that embraces success, grudgingly if need be.

Most important, country gave Ms. Swift context. It made her a transgressor, which means even her most benign songs could be read with mischievous intent. From the outside, she looked like a conquering titan. But from the inside looking out, even as the genre's biggest star, she was always something of an underdog, multiplatinum albums and accolades be damned.

That she would one day abandon country has long been clear. It's a big box, and a porous one, but a box all the same. '1989' (Big Machine), though, her fifth album and the first that doesn't at all bother with country, manages to find a new foe.

Full of expertly constructed, slightly neutered songs about heartbreak, '1989,' which is to be released on Monday, doesn't announce itself as oppositional. But there is an implicit enemy on this breezily effective album: the rest of mainstream pop, which '1989' has almost nothing in common with. Modern pop stars - white pop stars, that is - mainly get there by emulating black music. Think of Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber. In the current ecosystem, Katy Perry is probably the pop star least reliant on hip-hop and R&B to make her sound, but her biggest recent hit featured the rapper Juicy J; she's not immune.

Ms. Swift, though, is having none of that; what she doesn't do on this album is as important as what she does. There is no production by Diplo or Mike Will Made-It here, no guest verse by Drake or Pitbull. Her idea of pop music harks back to a period - the mid-1980s - when pop was less overtly hybrid. That choice allows her to stake out popular turf without having to keep up with the latest microtrends, and without being accused of cultural appropriation.

That Ms. Swift wants to be left out of those debates was clear in the video for this album's first single, the spry 'Shake It Off,' in which she surrounds herself with all sorts of hip-hop dancers and bumbles all the moves. Later in the video, she surrounds herself with regular folks, and they all shimmy un-self-consciously, not trying to be cool.

See what Ms. Swift did there? The singer most likely to sell the most copies of any album this year has written herself a narrative in which she's still the outsider. She is the butterfingers in a group of experts, the approachable one in a sea of high post, the small-town girl learning to navigate the big city.

In that sense, the most important decision Taylor Swift made in the last couple of years had nothing to do with music: She bought a pad in New York, paying about $20 million for a TriBeCa penthouse.

It was a molting, the culmination of several years of outgrowing Nashville combined with interest in Ms. Swift that placed her in tabloid cross-hairs just like any other global star.

But it also afforded her the opportunity once again to be seen as a naïf. In Nashville, she'd learned all the rules, all the back roads. Now, with that place more or less in the rear view, she is free to make the John Hughes movie of her imagination. That's '1989,' which opens with 'Welcome to New York,' a shimmery, if slightly dim celebration of the freedom of getting lost in Gotham: 'Everybody here was someone else before/And you can want who you want.' (As a gesture of tolerance, this is about 10 steps behind Kacey Musgraves's ' Follow Your Arrow.')

Ms. Swift hasn't been the type to ask permission in her career, but she has long seen herself as a stranger to the grand-scale fame that New York signifies. 'Someday I'll be living in a big ol' city' she taunted a critic on 'Mean,' from her 2010 album 'Speak Now'; now here she is, making the New York spotlight her backlight.

On this new stage, Ms. Swift is thriving. And crucially, she is more or less alone, not part of any pop movement of the day. She has set herself apart and, implicitly, above.

The era of pop she channels here was a collision of sleaze and romanticism, of the human and the digital. But there's barely any loucheness in Ms. Swift's voice. Her take on that sound is sandpapered flat and polished to a sheen. The album, named for the year she was born, is executive produced by Ms. Swift and Max Martin, and most of the songs are written with Mr. Martin and his fellow Swede Shellback. Both men have helped shape the last decade of pop but what's notable here is their restraint. (Mr. Martin also did almost all the vocal production on the album.) Ms. Swift's old running buddy Nathan Chapman produced 'This Love,' a mournful ballad that would have been at home of the 'Hunger Games: Catching Fire' soundtrack, and the only song here that could be mistaken for a concession to country.

The best country-defying songs on her last album, 'Red' - especially 'I Knew You Were Trouble,' another collaboration with Mr. Martin and Shellback - were also a move toward forward-sounding pop. Ms. Swift has many charms but stylistic envelope pushing has not always been among them. And yet those songs showed her to be more of a risk taker than she'd ever been, and savvy enough to know her fans would follow.

That vanguard attitude, though, isn't to be found on '1989,' which is largely filled with upbeat, tense songs on which the singer stomps out much of whatever was left of her youthful innocence. The Taylor Swift of this album is savage, wry, and pointed. The high mark is 'Style,' which recalls something from the original 'Miami Vice' soundtrack, all warm synths and damp vocals. 'Midnight/You come and pick me up/No headlights,' she oozes at the beginning of the song. By the chorus, she's flirty, but back in the verses, she's skeptical and a little bedraggled.

Ms. Swift has often sung in a talky manner, emphasizing intimacy over power and nuance, but on '1989' she uses her voice - processed more than ever - in different ways than before: the coy confidence of how she shifts gears leading up to the bridge in 'Shake It Off,' slithering out the line, 'But I keep cruising,' immediately changing the song from gum-snapping glee to powerful release. Or the way she sweetly drags out the long e in 'beat' on 'Welcome to New York'; or the bratty background chorus chants on 'All You Had to Do Was Stay.'

Her most pronounced vocal tweak is on 'Wildest Dreams,' a sweaty and dark tale of dangerous love. In the verses, Ms. Swift sings drowsily, as if seducing or just waking up: 'I said 'No one has to know what we do'/ His hands are in my hair/ His clothes are in my room.' Then, at the bridge, she skips up an octave, sputtering out bleats of ecstasy, before retreating back under the covers.

On this album, Ms. Swift's songwriting isn't as microdetailed as it has been, instead approaching heartbreak with a wider lens, as on 'This Love':

Tossing, turning, struggled through the night with someone new

And I could go on and on, on and on

Lantern, burning, flickered in my mind for only you

But you were still gone, gone, gone

And while there are certainly references to some of Ms. Swift's high-profile relationships, the album on the whole feels less diaristic than her previous work.

But don't be distracted by for whom the belle trolls; she trolls with glee, and that's what matters. Take the clever 'Blank Space,' a metanarrative about Ms. Swift's reputation as a dating disaster:

Saw you there and I thought

Oh my God, look at that face

You look like my next mistake

Love's a game, want to plaaaaaay?

This is Ms. Swift at her peak. It's funny and knowing, and serves to assert both her power and her primness. By contrast, the songs where she sounds the least jaded - 'How You Get the Girl,' 'Welcome to New York' - are among the least effective.

It's hard for Ms. Swift to still sell naïveté; she's too well-known and too good at her job. That's likely at least part of the reason that the bonus edition of this album includes three voice memos recorded by Ms. Swift on her telephone that showcase bits of songs in their early stages. They're there as gifts for obsessives, but also as boasts, flaunting her expertise and also her aw-shucks demeanor. 'I Wish You Would' shows her singing without any vocal manipulation, and though the lyrics to 'I Know Places' and 'Blank Space' changed a bunch from this stage to the final version, it's clear that the melodies were intact, and sturdy, from the beginning.

There are a few songs in which production dominates: the two songs written and produced with Jack Antonoff (of fun and Bleachers). 'Out of the Woods' and 'I Wish You Would,' which burst with erupting drums, moody synths and sizzling guitars; and 'Bad Blood,' which has booming drums reminiscent of the Billy Squier ones often sampled in hip-hop.

But these are outliers. Ms. Swift has always been melody first, and if she wanted to give herself over to a producer and sound of the moment, she could have gone several different, more obvious routes, or even stayed in country, which is as hip-hop inflected as pop is these days. (For the record, there are a few sort-of-modern phrases sprinkled through the lyrics - 'this sick beat,' ' mad love' and the chorus of 'Shake It Off,' where she squeaks 'the players gonna play, play, play, play, play/and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate' - though they are mostly there to underscore just how out of place Ms. Swift sounds singing them.)

But by making pop with almost no contemporary references, Ms. Swift is aiming somewhere even higher, a mode of timelessness that few true pop stars - aside from, say, Adele, who has a vocal gift that demands such an approach - even bother aspiring to. Everyone else striving to sound like now will have to shift gears once the now sound changes. But not Ms. Swift, who's waging, and winning, a new war, one she'd never admit to fighting.

Correction: October 23, 2014