Taylor Swift: Reputation (Big Machine/Universal)

At 15 songs and 55 minutes this new album by Taylor Swift may be just be a bit too long, but it's hard to see where the cull could be. Perhaps Dancing With Our Hands Tied because it isn't up to much, and do we need any more songs like Delicate deploying vocoder?

However as with the shapeshifting careers of the likes of Bjork, the Beatles, Radiohead and others, the prolific Swift – now 27, this her sixth studio album in a little over a decade – has taken her audience with her from her country debut through pop-country then mainstream pop and dance . . . and now further into hip-hop influenced electro-songs. Many of these here are co-writes with writer/producer Jack Antonoff and Swedish go-to guys Shellback (Karl Schuster) and Max Martin (Karl Sandberg) all back from Swift's 1989 album.

Shellback and Martin also co-wrote with Swift her earlier anthem We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together, one of those songs which got her out of high-school country-pop (like the excellent Mean) and into relationships and adulthood.

So there is a lot of proven star-power here and Swift doesn't squander it.

As always since her departure from country, her vocals often hit a carefully enunciated, melodically narrow range and play off simple rhyme schemes (Delicate a prime offender, only buoyed by the backing vocals).

But she packs in narratives, subtexts (she's a bad girl, as sexy and adult as the cover image suggests, Dress is almost orgasmic in its yearning) and allusions (“my baby loves me like I'm brand new”). There's even a melodic slice of I'm Too Sexy by Right Said Fred on her lead-off and desperate-sounding electro-clash single Look What You Made Me Do.

End Game with rapper Future and Ed Sheeran plays off the bad reputation image but is tough minded slice of hip-hop pop and comes with a great “big reputation oooo” hook, Getaway Car is as sassy and addictive.

Taylor Swift is – on the evidence the one concert Elsewhere has seen – a compelling and engaging performer, and as her music has become progressively more adult she's become more interesting and her lyrics increasingly layered.

But in the process a keen melodic sensibility has often been jettisoned in favour of the narrow-range repetition which dance pop demands. And over the long haul here some increasingly tedious and simplistic rhyming couplets which require considerable studio tweaking and arrangements to get them across the line.

A big step up and sideways by a smart writer, but unfortunately not without its shortcomings.