In a case of perfect timing, I discovered Superfruit’s medley of all 13 track of Taylor Swift’s 1989 just as I was posting my own review of the album.
So I’ll wrap up this not-random weekend with their take on the record, which is predictably awesome. Maybe not up to the level of their Beyoncé medley, but excellent nonetheless.
I’m taking a break from Random Weekends in order to get in a quick review of Taylor Swift’s 1989. Swift’s music has generated enough discussion on the blog that I feel I owe it to my loyal readers to chime in on this latest batch.
1989 is, as everybody knows by now, Taylor Swift’s “pop” album. Though she has always flirted with pop in her music, even when she was a bona fide country artist, she has fully embraced the genre here.
Vampire Weekend has released two excellent albums in the 10s (with more to come, I can only assume). They are the rare band that showed complete mastery of their craft from the very beginning.
Each of their three records is focused and confident, nodding (sometimes very obviously) to influences but converting them into something fresh and unique.
Miranda Lambert is one of the artists making multiple appearances on this list, and she shows up first as part of Pistol Annies, the country girl group she formed with friends and fellow songwriters Angaleena Presley and Ashley Monroe.
The best supergroups feel not like stunts but an organic coming together of similar musical sensibilities. The Traveling Wilburys are an old-school example, and Pistol Annies work just as well as that grizzled bunch.
Three artists placed two albums on my list of the top 20 records of the decade so far, and Lana Del Rey nearly joined their ranks.
Both her debut Born to Die and this year’s Ultraviolence made a strong case for landing on the list, but in the end I went only with the moodier sophomore effort.
Meet Me In Montauk 