I’ve been having a really nice time recently.

A few weeks ago I went to Poland for a weekend with my two older brothers and three friends, and then last week I visited Greece with my girlfriend for our one year anniversary.

The holidays were good, and I enjoyed engaging in the local culture on both occasions (vodka tasting/fiscal irresponsibility), but now I’m back in England and it’s freezing cold at the end of April and I have to go back to work tomorrow. Suffice to say: I am unhappy.

But there is good news. I received word via satellite phone this morning that there’s a new Taylor Swift album out, and that the people of Bulgaria are in desperate need of a sad Englishman in his early-to-late twenties to tell them whether it’s any good or not.

Considering the length of the album, I’ll end the intro here. At least one of us needs to demonstrate the value of brevity.

Fortnight (feat. Post Malone)

Man, I really have been too optimistic recently because I honestly thought we were living in a post-Post Malone world. Is this the longest that a bad musician with bad face tattoos has survived unearned fame? No wonder he’s singing about Fortnite, Post Malone is outrunning a storm every day.

This song is really boring and I’m disappointed because when you hear that someone has used the word ‘tortured’ in their album title, it usually means that there will be one of two things on the tracks within: some insane guitar riffs, or some really bizarre, extremely personal lyrics.

Taylor tells us that all of her mornings are Mondays. She’s stuck in an endless February.

It’s lucky that I love my country and my people.

The Tortured Poets Department

By now we’ve all laughed at the lyrics to this song, posted on Twitter in advance of the album’s release, but my god, nothing prepared me for hearing them spoken out loud by Miss Swift. I’m now beginning to wonder if maybe this album is an extremely unsubtle parody of her own brand – the bored meanderings of a mind uncomplicated by struggle and lack of options. I might just be hoping that’s the case because it’s the kind of thing I’d do if I had access to her resources, but if we find out in a year’s time that she did this on purpose I’ll have no choice but to crown her Funniest White Woman Ever, dethroning my good friend Jen.

As a side note, I think that this is the first time I’ve heard Taylor Swift swear in one of her songs, and I absolutely love that it comes as naturally to her as tenpin bowling does to a three-legged fieldmouse.

“At dinner you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one

People put wedding rings on

And that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.”

She’s either a genius or the dumbest person alive.

My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys

There’s some interesting synth going on in the back of this that feels incredibly underutilised, especially towards the end of the track, where it feels like if the focus was shifted from Taylor’s annoying lyrics to the actual music, it could be a good song! Or at least, part of a good song! Someone should sample the synth in this and make a good song! I’d like to hear a good song please! Maybe something like this:

My Boy Only Breaks His Favourite Toys (Grimes’ Version)

Not interested in commenting on the rest of the track really. Much of the same as the previous two: slow, meandering, boring. Has she become allergic to tempo changes?

Down Bad

You can’t be talking like that White Baby.

So Long, London

Broke my record for ‘earliest point in an album to check how many songs are left’. Despair.

What has happened to Taylor Swift? Where have all the choruses gone? Where’s the fun? I know it’s the Tortured Poet’s Department, but why am I being tortured? I thought she was the one being tortured. I wanted to hear her being tortured.

This is yet another track where I’m left wondering what could have been if she’d just decided to make a banger with the bare bones she’s shown here. Because she can make bangers. We all know she can make bangers. But there’s no personality here, no joy in the process, no passion for the dancefloor. In my previous TSwift review I mentioned how she was one of the pioneers of this new type of party song that became popular and completely replaced instructional pop like the Casper Slide and the Macarena sometime around 2010 – floor fillers that everyone knows, songs you can scream the words to and dance semi-ironically through at your cousin’s wedding or funeral. But that energy so far is completely missing from this album. Is this a result of Taylor taking herself a bit too seriously after all?

But Daddy I Love Him

Alright!!! This is better! I’m not gonna get carried away and say that it’s a great song which earns its almost six-minute runtime or anything, but it’s definitely better!

In this track, Taylor appears to construct a fictional narrative in which a small town community disapproves of her young love, and the themes and tone are reminiscent of her much earlier, much livelier work. I’ve always been a big proponent of the idea that, if you’re a songwriter running out of ideas, a concept album is your best bet, and this song seems to be a piece of micro-evidence that I’m onto something.

Listenable.

Fresh Out The Slammer

Taylor Swift does this thing occasionally where she sings rhyming lyrics in a weird, stilted, pendulum-like way. She does it all the way through this and although I find it very annoying, I suppose it is a Vintage Swift motif, so I can’t complain about her going back to her roots immediately after requesting she do exactly that. To be clear though it does sound dogshit.

Florida!!! (feat. Florence + The Machine)

It’s an absolutely insane choice to get a much more talented singer to feature on your terrible new album. Predictably, Florence blows Taylor out of the water on this track, but, Jesus Christ! Why does she insist on doing the fake-out chorus thing? At several moments in this song, it really feels like they’re about to take it up a level but then, no, it drops back down again. What is her fucking problem? If she carries on like this I’m just gonna start reviewing something else instead. I’m furious.

Guilty As Sin?

The opening guitar kicks you in the face.

You’re shaking in your seat. Oh, this is NOT your daddy’s James Bond.

The first time I heard Chris Cornell’s You Know My Name, the theme for Daniel Craig’s Bond debut Casino Royale, I was ten years old. For the next three years it was the most played song on my iPod Nano. My brothers would laugh at me when I told people my favourite band was Chris Cornell. But it was true.

I’m listening to it again now and I honestly don’t think anyone has nailed their Bond theme like this since the eighties.

“Arm yourself because no one else here will save you.”

No they fucking won’t James. You have to do this yourself. You’re all alone and I wish I could help you so bad, but I can’t. You’ll have to rely on the trusty Q and M.

“You can’t deny the prize, it may never fulfil you

It longs to kill you

Are you willing to die?”

It’s a dangerous job James, and it’s a thankless task. Are you willing to accept that? Are you willing to die?

“The coldest blood runs through my veins,

You know my name.”

I DO KNOW YOUR NAME JAMES. IT’S BOND, JAMES BOND.

10/10

Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?

“You wouldn’t last an hour

In the asylum where they raised me.”

Hahahaha. Shut up man.

This song actually isn’t that bad. It’s funny and stupid but I can imagine people shouting the words which is a nice change. More of a bedroom shout than a dancefloor shout, but we’re getting there.

I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)

Having rewatched it recently, I think Quantum of Solace is probably the most underrated of the Daniel Craig Bonds, and so it follows that the accompanying song, Another Way to Die, performed by Jack White and Alicia Keys, is also the most underrated of the recent themes.

It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s punchy and violent and the vocal combination of Keys and White really works. I don’t think that the grungy guitar particularly matches the tone of the film in the same way the Casino Royale theme does, but it sounds so good that it really doesn’t matter at all.

This song is a real relic of a time before Adele ruined Bond themes for everyone else, and for that at the very least I appreciate its existence. Right wing meatheads love to moan about comedy and say: “You couldn’t make that these days!”, but in the case of Another Way to Die, you literally couldn’t make it these days.

loml

Right if you’re gonna make a boring slow song, at least do it like this. This is pleasant. Taylor’s vocals really hit the mark here, and the gentle piano carries us through the track on a nice little cloud of soft thoughts and feelings.

Is it my favourite type of Taylor Swift song? No, but it’s compelling and coherent and the lyrics aren’t stupid enough to throw the whole thing off.

I Can Do It With a Broken Heart

I fucking love the backing music in this one. This is so good. I’m genuinely very surprised there’s a good song on this album but we’ve finally found one, together :)

It almost makes me feel bad about taking the piss with all of the other ones because this is really good. Maybe I’ll give it a rest.

The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived

Look, look, when I said that Adele ruined Bond themes for everyone else, I didn’t mean that hers was bad. Hers is actually incredible, isn’t it? Undeniably. When I was writing that earlier bit about how Chris Cornell was the first guy to nail the tone of the film with his song in years, I had kind of forgotten how good Skyfall is (song not film).

Adele knows what she’s doing. She turned Bond themes from something a bit strange and quirky into something of high class. Jack White and Alicia Keys wouldn’t have been able to follow Skyfall – they’re too funny of a pairing in comparison to the prestige of Adele – and I think that has been a big issue for Bond producers ever since this film was released.

How do you follow Adele? How do you follow one of our nation’s few remaining sweethearts? Do they swallow their pride and go back to something silly - Alex Turner and Cheryl Cole perhaps? Robbie Williams on a bongo? Or do they try to match the gravitas of Adele - hiring someone else equally talented who can match, or maybe even surpass, the quality of Skyfall?

Nah, get Sam Smith on it.

The Alchemy

I don’t have anything against Sam Smith but if you cheat by using literal Bond film score right at the start of your theme and then still manage to produce such an utterly unremarkable and unmemorable song, you will not be remembered favourably by history.

As I said before, this was never going to be an easy task, and following Adele is incredibly tough work, but fucking come on. Listen to these lyrics:

“How do I live?

How do I breathe?

When you’re not here I’m suffocating

I want to feel love

Run through my blood

Tell me is this where I give it all up?

For you I have to risk it all.”

James wouldn’t say any of that. He owns too many guns.

Clara Bow

It’s so funny when you look at the Spotify listener stats on an album like this. The first track, Fortnight, has one hundred and forty seven million views as of right now. Clara Bow, this last track, has a measly forty-one million. I know that some of this will be accounted for by people sitting on the bus and pressing play on the album when it’s only a ten-minute ride, but I wonder how many people were genuinely excited for a new Taylor Swift release and then never made it to the end to discover one of the more accomplished songs?

I like this one. It’s nice and melodic and it’s a good enough way to go out considering that no part of me expected her to go out with a big pop banger this time around. I might even prefer it to Billie Eilish’s theme for No Time to Die, also titled ‘No Time to Die’. What a boring song for Bond to die to. No wonder he killed himself.

The Tortured Poets Department – 2/10

A waste of time. I don’t think I learned anything new about Taylor Swift, who we always knew was someone in dire need of a more private journal, and I haven’t changed my mind about which Bond song is the best.

As always, You Know My Name.