Glendon R Frank

oh thank god i finally have a draft of my master's statement written. need to somehow be less burned out all of the time but we're too busy too address that.

genuinely taylor laced something heinous in her newest album because any time a clip of song plays in an instagram reel that shit is stuck in my head on loop dealing psychic damage to me.

music to listen to when you are having a Good Time

The John Ottman theme is fun and it was cool to get it back but if there was any justice in the world this would have been the theme for all the "prequel" X-Men movies. We could have had it all.

Nouvelle Vague is now out of WestHills before I had the chance to go 😓 I need to keep a tighter eye on everything. Genuinely only realized it was there when I went for It Was Just an Accident this Tuesday.

Letterboxd being down is incredibly stressful for people like me who's entire personality revolves around "open Letterboxd and look at all the colourful movies"

Also, can anyone confirm if The Mastermind already came and went in Calgary?? I am assuming not, it just is weird to see it seemingly released wide everywhere else.

So the WestHills cineplex is currently the only theatre in Calgary showing either It Was Just an Accident or Nouvelle Vague - is it becoming the new Eau Claire, as a Cinplex-branded theatre that will play the indie/prestige hits?

Finally watching Inland Empire for Halloween. There’s nothing I love quite like being an hour into a Lynch movie and not understanding anything ✨

my basic hope is that the costs get too high for the companies and they start to privatize everything so that the average joe isn't using it for everything

“Well let’s check out how the game went today”
*looks around*
“wtf do you mean it’s still going.“

The thing that holds back games as a potential artform is that they are so entangeld in consumerism. Video game art pieces exist but they are the absolute minority. The creation of most games are driven by capitalism first and pure escapism second, rarely by an impulse to express anything deeper.

the "video games are art!!" conversation is never going to go anywhere until video games stop remaking and remastering old games under the delusion that age makes them bad or innaccessible.

Art stands the test of time. If your creation needs to keep being reheated, it's not art, it's a product.

"engagement bait" is such a crass term. When I was a kid, we called it "ring by spring"

when coldplay said "everything that kills me makes me wanna die" i felt that

does anyone have like thirty minutes to tell me if this abstract is good or not

"you don't let taylor write fun albums anymore!!!" actually, fun. albums are written by nate russ and - you guess it - jack antanoff, so write that down

I don't think Taylor is over, but she desperately needs a restart. Get off the internet for five years, be in a band, I don't know, something. And come back when she actually has a cohesive statement of an album, not an hour of the same-ish synth pop she's done for nearly five albums.

To loop back, Taylor's skill has always been her storytelling, and in particular her accessible way of telling deeply emotive yet relatable stories. This album has none of that. It's waxed and waned since Folklore but it's entirely gone here. She's unrecognizable, and all relatability has vanished.

It's also perplexing bc TTPD literally just did the "I hate being in the spotlight" thing but in a way that was at least accessible, framing it through the lens of a breakdown and a breakup. Life of a Showgirl is just noise, a rich person complaining about their wealth and profiting from it.

The clearest theme is that she "hates" fame and attention but is happy to be in a stable relationship, which... is a thing Reputation did a thousand times better, and with less posturing. Or at least, with more intentional posturing. That album at least interrogated the iconoclastic nature of fame.

Thankfully, Life of a Showgirl is a brisk 43 minutes across 12 tracks, but even with that attempt at restraint it doesn't seem like Taylor actually cares to *say* anything here. The album indulges in her worst songwriting, complaining about the internet and spending a whole song on Kelce's "wood."

This is an overlong thread but I mostly just don't understand why she keeps putting all this energy into aesthetic "era" designs without any care for the actual albums. Why dress the album so bombastically if you're not even going to put a real pop hit on it? Why hire Max Martin? Why any of this?

But Life of a Showgirl is her most confused work yet. Advertised with bright colours and maximalist burlesque stylings, the actual album is just kind of more soft synth pop, but with a 00's flair now and a bass guitar. The sound is internally consistent but mostly in that it's pretty boring.

TTPD is the ultimate background album; Taylor has created a great sense of space, but it comes at the cost of her seeming to have written two albums' worth of first drafts and published them without thought. It's expressive, but not cohesive, and certainly not concise. A mural more than an album.

I like Tortured Poets but it's even worse for this. 31 songs with the Anthology, and while I think they have a clearer identity to them (kind of low-synth quiet crash-out music) the indulgence permits any real artistic ideas to come through. It's two hours of being sad, which I like, but is a mess.

What's worse, the initial premise of "13 sleepless nights" doesn't even hold the album together because three hours later she dropped an extra set of songs that throw off the whole motif and sound even more different. Midnights is 22 vaguely synthpop songs with no clear throughline or joining idea.

Listen to the way that her vocals are recorded. LH starts by playing with distortion effects, filtering her voice in all directions to create a new atmosphere. The best songs, like MR, lean into the effect - but most songs on the record abandon it and could fit into any other album anonymously.

Midnights is, at best, a fractal exploration of Taylor's life as examined through the process of her re-releases. But while the visual design of the album took on a 70's audiophile atmosphere, the actual album hesitantly dips its toes into modern bedroom pop tones, afraid to pick a clear identity.

Evermore was pitched as an extension of Folklore and it shows. There are good songs there, and it least has a clear enough sonic identity, but it's always been let down by not having the clarity of vision or structure that Folklore does. Evermore is a hazy night in a cabin in the dead of winter.