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Rolling Stone

Like Kanye West, Taylor Swift is a turbine of artistic ambition and superstar drama. So it's no surprise she manages to make her fourth album both her Joni Mitchell-influenced maturity binge and her Max Martin-abetted pop move – and have it seem not just inevitable but natural.

 

Red is a 16-song geyser of willful eclecticism that's only tangentially related to Nashville (much like Swift herself at this point). The album pinballs from the U2-tinged liftoff of "State of Grace" to the dubstep-y teen pop of "I Knew You Were Trouble" to "The Last Time," a sad piano duet with Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol. Swift's bedrock is driving, diaristic post-country rock – see the breakup flashback "All Too Well," where she drops the great image of "dancing around the kitchen in the refrigerator light" with her ex.

 

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Entertainment Weekly

The writer James Dickey once described a poet as ''someone who stands outside in the rain, hoping to be struck by lightning.'' He could've been talking about Taylor Swift. When the Dean of Tween isn't inviting guys to meet her in the pouring rain, she's courting danger any other way she can, just for the drama of it all. Her new album is called Red — as in red light or red alert — and it finds her singing about walking directly into traffic, wading into quicksand, and flirting with the kinds of jerks Kanye West might toast to. ''You look like bad news,'' she purrs on ''22.'' ''I gotta have you.'' One gets the feeling that it's not this guy's love she's after. She's just using him for the breakup songs.

 

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MTV

 

"This is the golden age of something good," Taylor Swift sings on "State of Grace," the opening track of her Red album, and though she says the song is about the promise of a new relationship, it's difficult not to add additional import to the line — especially after hearing her fantastic new record in full.

 

Because this is an album she's spent her entire career building toward. Each hit she's scored, every award she's won and all the high-profile breakups she's endured have led to its creation. Red is, in every conceivable way, her bid for artistic freedom, not only her most mature and accomplished album, but also her most unapologetic. No longer content to be shoehorned into country, she fully embraces her pop side, working with Max Martin and Shellback on a trio of tracks. Not concerned with being cool, she disses hipsters and writes songs with dudes like Ed Sheeran (though she does have Arcade Fire pal Owen Pallett conduct the strings at one point). And undeterred by her age, or her critics, she fully shoulders the load, writing each of Red's 16 songs and — very prominently — taking a "creative director" credit in its liner notes.

 

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Pop Crush

On her fourth album ‘Red,’ Swift remains diary-honest and confessional, laying her emotional cards face up in lieu of a pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa poker face. Right here is where we’d normally point out that despite that reference to a fellow pop star, Swift is far removed from typical pop sonics and synths.

 

But we can’t say that about ‘Red.’ She experiments. She tries new things. She has largely stepped away from the country sounds of her past. She still straddles the line between country and pop, and is of course pop country, but she continues to walk the tight rope towards the pop end of the line.

 

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