On her richly resonant second album of the year, Swift dabbles with country noir and dives into the world of unbalanced relationships
It’s testament to the tightness of these two “sister albums” that the title of Taylor Swift’s first album of 2020 – Folklore – occurs as a lyric not on the album of the same name, but on Gold Rush, a track on Swift’s surprise second outing of 2020, Evermore. Gold Rush finds Swift writing from the point of view of a swooning fan-girl in love, wary of fancying someone who everyone else desires. Divested of its atmospheric arrangement, which continues the textured bent Taylor essayed on Folklore, Gold Rush would not have felt out of place on Swift’s brace of more pop-oriented albums: impressionistic and emotionally resonant but rich with detail and witty asides.
Swift is a songwriter for the ages, “stronger than a 90s trend”, as she sings on Willow. But she’s still a little muted on Evermore as she was on Folklore by pastel music that smears Vaseline on her otherwise keen lens. Fortunately, this slew of character studies often shrug off the music’s politeness. She pairs nuance with incisiveness on Tolerate It and Closure, two deep dives into unbalanced relationships. On the country noir No Body, No Crime, she teams up with Haim to execute the perfect crime.