The Life Of A Showgirl

Despite a greater variance in beat drops and textural flourishes (that way the drum machine fades into the post-chorus saxophone is the only redeemable thing about "Honey"), the middling mid-tempo The Life of a Showgirl strays even further from the magic Swift's pen once wielded.

The Life Of A Showgirl isn’t a particularly bad album, but given Swift’s immense back catalogue, too much of it sounds like an artist on autopilot and in need of a rest.

We may have seen Taylor on far better songwriting form than with ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’, but perhaps now, more than ever, she is making music for herself over anyone else.

Should, in hindsight, this turn out as a selection of ‘on the road’-composed pieces, which were quickly released to make way for a more daring and bold work, I would not at all be surprised. But until then, this is an album that Swiftologists will hotly debate as to what just happened here.

Gone are the wistfulness and melancholy that permeated her last four albums, yet ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ still sounds curiously muted despite Swift reuniting with pop super-producers Max Martin and Shellback for the first time in eight years.

The Life of a Showgirl finds Swift making a purposeful shift in her persona. She doesn’t fully retcon the narratives of her work to date, but, perhaps for the first time, she leans fully into the idea of her persona as a work of artifice. The 12 songs here are either a peek under the mask or are another mask altogether. From a critical perspective, that pivot makes it at least a little bit interesting as an exercise, but what’s most surprising about The Life of a Showgirl is the extent to which it’s off-putting both as a pop album and as a Taylor Swift album.

Whatever vision Martin and Shellback set out to realize here is not really serving her strengths and, intentionally or not, appears to signal a disinterest in evolution.

The person Swift is competing with most now is herself, and the bulk of The Life Of A Showgirl can’t measure up to the dizzying heights of her previous triumphs. Perhaps that’s because there isn’t a clear sense of who she is or what she truly wants on The Life Of A Showgirl.

There’s plenty to admire of Swift – her voice, her curiosity, her ability to mine emotional nuance – but that’s been true of every Swift era. What’s missing here is the glue. Similar to Red, some tracks just don’t mesh.

‘The Life Of A Showgirl’ has its moments, but lacks the consistency of Taylor’s recent work.

"Showgirl" feels like a retreat from the vivid bloodletting of "Tortured Poets." .... Maybe those songs ["Opalite," "Ruin the Friendship," "Father Figure," & the title track] are Swift’s way of telling us that she knows "The Life of a Showgirl" isn’t as sharp as it could’ve been. We’ll see if it’s as tidy as it needed to be.

Built around pianos and acoustic guitars, with lots of strings and harmonious backing vocals, it feels sleek but self-contained, akin to a Carole King album glossed up for modern listeners.